Huawei will be unveiling its next Android flagship in mid-October, the company confirmed during its IFA 2018 conference held earlier today. The device lineup that’s expected to be advertised as the Mate 20 will be officially announced on October 16 at a product event in London. Huawei said the upcoming handset series will be the world’s first mobile family to feature its newly revealed Kirin 980 system-on-chip, with that claim also providing some context regarding the availability of the Honor Magic 2. First teased by Huawei’s subsidiary yesterday, the Magic 2 was already implied to be carrying the Kirin 980 but it appears that the device won’t be released before late November, whereas the Mate 20 line should already be available for purchase by then.
With references to a “smarter” experience and “higher intelligence,” Huawei’s latest product announcement is clearly pointing to the Kirin 980 being one of the main selling points of the Mate 20 family, with the chip in question being the world’s first silicon with two neural processing units dedicated to on-device machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications. With the company’s P20 Pro being the first mainstream handset to feature a triple-camera setup, at least one Mate 20-series model is expected to follow suit, whereas Huawei’s imaging AI designed for smart scene recognition is expected to make a return as well.
Between the Mate 20, LG V40, and the OnePlus 6T, Android fans should have a lot of new flagships to look forward to in the final quarter of the year, though Huawei’s upcoming high-end offering is likely to outsell all of them. Both the Mate 10 and P20 series did well, selling millions upon millions of units on a global scale, and that’s without Huawei having access to the world’s largest market for premium smartphones – the United States. The Mate 20 is unlikely to officially launch in the U.S. as well, with Washington still opposing the idea of allowing Huawei to run a stateside operation on any significant scale, citing national security concerns that the Chinese firm deems baseless.