Huawei’s upcoming Mate 20 Pro flagship is likely to sport an OLED display with two curved edges, South Korean outlet ETNews reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter. Chinese panel manufacturer BOE will be supplying the phone maker with the screen modules in question, as per the same source. BOE and Huawei have already been collaborating on another mobile project for months now, with industry insiders previously claiming the two firms are working on an 8-inch foldable device meant to function as both a smartphone and a tablet, depending on whether it’s folded out or not.
BOE will start mass-producing flexible OLED module for the Mate 20 Pro later this month, according to the same report. Huawei already commercialized a handset with a curved display earlier this year, having debuted it in the form of the Mate RS Porsche Design, which is also its first smartphone to feature an in-screen fingerprint reader and two such biometric scanners in total. Samsung is still the only major original equipment manufacturer that’s launching mobile devices with curved screens on a regular basis, having started doing so in early 2015 with the Galaxy S6 Edge. The South Korean tech giant is also working on a bendable handset of its own and while recent reports suggest that product will be introduced in the first half of 2019, Huawei and BOE may beat it to the punch by commercializing such a handset in the final quarter of this year, according to a number of rumors which have been circulating the industry for several months now.
The Mate 20 series is also likely to be powered by the Kirin 980, the next system-on-chip from Huawei’s subsidiary HiSilicon. Much like its predecessor, the module is expected to have a neural processing unit dedicated to artificial intelligence applications and power the next generation of the Huawei P family as well, though it remains to be seen whether that line ends up being advertised as the P30 or the Chinese firm opts for yet another soft rebranding.