Huawei’s Mate 9 and Honor 6X are both making headlines with leaked renders and other pre-release details leading up to the two phones officially dropping. A new piece of media has shown up, this time a bona fide photo of an internal prototype model, complete with protective casing. According to the source of the leak, the device on show here is the Mate 9. The black plastic case obscures most of the phone, but a few significant details can be made out; namely, a dual camera, a fingerprint scanner, and a mysterious third uncovered spot on the case with its function unknown at this time, if there is any function to it at all.
The phone seen in the new photo is shown with the hand of the person taking it, giving us a basis for a size comparison, albeit a hazy one. A quick glance at the photo and the scale of the phone against the hand holding it seems to point to a somewhat larger device, somewhere near the 5.7 inch mark, if not as big as something like the Lenovo PHAB2 Pro or the Motorola Nexus 6. This lines up nicely with claims that the phone is the newest in the Mate lineup, since the Mate 8 was a whopping 6.0 inches. The leaked device features a dual camera setup similar to the found on the Huawei P9, and the fingerprint sensor looks similar, and similarly placed, to the one on the Nexus 6P.
All signs seem to point to this leaked shot being of the Mate 9 like the leaker claims, but it’s interesting to note that the rear image looks quite a lot like the picture of the upcoming Honor 6X that TENAA was given by Huawei, down to the dot-style LED flash next to the dual cameras. If this is indeed the Mate 9, that may mean that Huawei is looking to unify its design language a bit, moving toward much the same homogeneous image that the likes of Samsung and Sony embrace for their own device lineups; while not every device would look the same, one glance at the device would tell you it’s definitely a Huawei, if this is the case. For now, all anybody can do is take this photo at face value and wait for more leaks as the official announcements for both phones draw closer.