In the past few years, Huawei has invested a lot in its smartphone division. The company sold over 100 million phones in 2015 alone and is all set to best this figure by a considerable margin this year. This month itself, Huawei released two new devices, namely the high-end Huawei P9 flagship and the mid-range affordable Huawei 5C. But there are many other phones to come like the Huawei Honor V8 and even the mighty Mate 9. While technically, it has been just a few months since the current generation Mate 8 started selling, rumors about the next gen model have already started to come in.
Yesterday, Pan Jiutang revealed some of the possible specs of the Huawei Kirin 960 chipset. Along with that information, he further added that Huawei’s Mate 9 flagship will feature this chip inside, most likely making it the first in the market. The upcoming Kirin 960 is expected to be much better than Kirin 950, featuring the still unannounced ARM’s Artemis cores and an octa-core architecture.
Along with this information, he also revealed that Huawei Mate 9 could come with 20MP dual rear cameras. As we know, the company is not new to the concept of dual cameras, with the most recent flagship Huawei P9 featuring 12MP dual cameras certified by Leica. While the source didn’t reveal whether the setup on the Mate 9 will also be certified by Leica, it’s possible, since Huawei seems to be invested heavily in this partnership with the legendary lens maker.
The Kirin 960 chip is also expected to upgrade the baseband to support Cat. 12 LTE speeds as well as CDMA networks. So, it could become the first true full netcom chipset from the company. Even the GPU is expected to be upgraded to an octa-core setup, which would definitely boost the graphics performance of the chip.
So, it looks like the Mate 9 is going to be a powerful flagship. Considering the usual release period of the company, we can expect the Mate 9 to meet us sometime late 2016.
