Huawei P50 Series Officially Teased at the HarmonyOS Event; Camera Cluster is More Powerful than Ever

At their big HarmonyOS event today, where Huawei introduced a new version of the OS, a new smartwatch, tablets, and monitors, the upcoming Huawei P50 Pro lineup was also teased for the very first time. It gives us a quick peek into the phone’s design; Huawei officials also commented on the release date for the P50 line.

If you’ve been following the endless string of leaks preceding this announcement, the design will be of little surprise. Huawei P50’s camera island is more elaborate than ever, featuring not one but two separate housings. 

The top ring contains three lenses, while the bottom one has a single zoom camera and what’s reportedly a color temperature sensor. Rumor has it that this telephoto lens supports variable zooming. It won’t be out of character since its predecessor, the P40 Pro+, debuted with a 10x periscope lens. 

Both housings have chrome accents, all embedded inside an egg-shaped camera bump with an LED flash. You can also make out Leica’s branding stamped right below the camera cluster. The shell of the Huawei new model for 2021 has a metal frame, beveled along the edges and corners. It’s all painted in a perfectly glassy finish, available in at least two editions — gold and black.

Huawei’s CEO also noted that the P50 series doesn’t have a launch timeline yet for undisclosed reasons. But many sources speculate it has to do with the ongoing chipset shortage. Because Huawei doesn’t have enough Kirin chips in stock, it turned to Qualcomm to power its flagships (much like the new MatePad tablets which use this silicon.)

But the American semiconductor company is only licensed to supply Huawei with 4G Snapdragon chipsets. The LTE variant of the Snapdragon 888 has yet to come out, hence the delay.