Huawei’s long-rumored Mate 20 Pro may make use of one of Samsung’s OLED panels if new reports out of South Korea are to be believed. According to the source, the company recently made plans to purchase an unspecified number of the screen technology in a massive 6.9-inch format, with shipping expected to start on August 8. Those will be in a flat configuration, unlike other displays recently reported to be appearing on a future 6.2-inch handset made by OPPO. It’s worth pointing out that the size of the display makes speculation about a Mate 20 Pro-branded Huawei device seem a bit unlikely. After all, that’s nearly an inch larger than the previous Mate 10 Pro and even provides substantially more screen real-estate than Samsung’s own Galaxy Note 9 is expected to. That other flagship phablet is expected to feature a 6.38-inch display. It’s not entirely out of the question since the more standard Huawei Mate 20 is currently expected to ship with a 6.1-inch panel.
If the Mate 20 Pro is going to be a 7-inch handset, it will push the boundaries and blur the lines between a smartphone and tablet. In the meantime, haven’t been many details provided about the larger of the two Mate 20-branded smartphones. However, the smaller Huawei Mate 20 is thought to have been benchmarked back in April and there shouldn’t be too many differences in terms of internal specifications. That test, while not necessarily reliable, showed benchmarks up to 67-percent better than the scores received by the Huawei Mate 10. The handset was also shown being powered by an A.I.-augmented Kirin 980 SoC, thought to be built on a 7nm process node. Meanwhile, there’s been no news about the RAM or flash storage backing that processor up but it would be difficult to imagine Huawei opting to include less than 6GB of RAM. In the pro version, it may even bump that number to 8GB and storage will likely be higher as well. Current trends in the industry suggest that 64GB of storage would be the bare minimum while that could push all the way up to 512GB.
Having said all of that, the possibility of a completely different 7-inch device wouldn’t be unexpected either. As mentioned above, that scale is beginning to push into tablet territory at the smallest end of the spectrum. So this may point to a Huawei 7-inch class tablet. With the new Mate 20 devices planned for the third quarter or second half of 2018 – depending on who’s making the prediction – at least it won’t be too long before the matter is cleared up.