Huawei P50 and P50 Pro are official and officially have the weirdest cameras you’ve ever seen



[ad_1]

Huawei’s repeatedly leaked P50 series has been officially announced. As you’d probably expect, these still don’t come bundled with Google apps or the Play Store, making them a total non-starter for most people, but die-hard Huawei fans want to get their apps elsewhere. (I guess such people exist) can celebrate the release of the latest flagship line, a gargantuan pair of camera bumps and all.

Big camera hump.

P50 Pro

The P50 Pro has a back that only its designer can love, with the biggest, weirdest camera bump I think I’ve ever seen. By its sheer scale and the above specs, it’s clear that the camera was a priority for Huawei on these new phones. In addition to super-high-resolution sensors, a large-aperture black-and-white camera and a periscope-style telephoto lens with 3.5x “zoom”, Huawei has also incorporated a bunch of other hardware and software features, like “HUAWEI XD Optical”, “XD Fusion Pro Image Engine” (which claims to double the light captured compared to the P40 Pro) and “True-Chroma Shot”. The company claims very precise color science and accuracy, along with improved HDR performance and a dedicated fast black-and-white camera to increase light absorption capacity in low light.

I should also point out that Huawei alternately claims digital zoom up to 100x or 200x, and I’m not entirely sure what is correct.

Every smartphone company makes big claims about photos, but Huawei is among the few who can usually back it up not only with high-end hardware, but also with treatment, so it will likely have a beastly camera.

It’s not clear whether other markets might get different versions of the phone, but the specifications Huawei posted on its Chinese site currently only claim 4G connectivity, and the press release announcing the phones also makes no claim. mention of 5G connectivity. This is sort of a big omission for a “flagship” in 2021, and it is not clear whether the sanctions are to some extent to be blamed for the omission.

If the storage options aren’t big enough for you, there’s always Huawei’s super stupid proprietary NM cards to expand it up to 256GB. The phone comes in several different “versions”: a benchmark of 8 GB with multiple storage options and a 12 GB version with 512 GB of storage only. Kirin 9000 and Snapdragon 888 versions are available on top of that.

At least one of the colors is “electrochromic” and can apparently change color slightly when calls come in, which is pretty fancy.

When it comes to software, Huawei claims it runs HarmonyOS 2, apparently the company’s in-house operating system that was born out of the minds of Huawei engineers in just two years, press releases and datasheets with no reference to Android. (A Google translation of the Chinese datasheet calls it “Huawei Terminal Hongmeng Smart Device Operating System Software V2.0” if you’re kidding.) But, as anyone who has been watching the news already knows, Harmony OS doesn’t is an Android fork with bad documentation. Huawei still can’t get Play Services or the Play Store either, so not only can it not get most of the apps you want, some of them wouldn’t work if you just loaded them anyway without manually install GMS. This is not the right time.

Pre-orders open tomorrow in China from ¥ 5,988.

P50

The non-Pro P50 is a small step backwards, ditching the periscope-style telephoto camera and settling for “just” the option for a Snapdragon 888. According to the published datasheets, it also has a slightly smaller and a bit smaller. less fluid display. Still, it generally meets the other 2021 flagship standards.

Again, it looks like it’s only 4G at the moment (again, this is a strange omission, but it could vary depending on the market model later). It also meets most of its big brother’s specifications, although it lacks 50W wireless charging.

Pre-orders open in China tomorrow from ¥ 4,488.

These two new phones seem to show that Huawei is starting to give in a bit under the pressure of the US embargo. They are ‘flagships’, but (at least in China) devoid of 5G, running a poorly documented Android fork and limited to the benefit of Google’s apps and services due to current sanctions. The company’s market share appears to be in free fall and it is no longer even one of the top five brands in China. The P50 series shows a company in transition and in difficulty. Hopefully this can find a way to turn the tide and keep the competition going for consumers. The last thing we need is another brand to leave the market with LG now gone and HTC’s zombie corpse still lurking in carrier stores.

[ad_2]

Source link