Huawei could release P60 and Mate 60 flagship lines next March

Because of the U.S. restrictions placed on Huawei, the company has been forced to release only one flagship series per year. Previously, the manufacturer would launch its photography-focused (no puns were killed in the construction of this sentence) “P series” phones at the beginning of the year. Near the end of the same year, the “Mate series” would be released with the latest tech-based innovations.

Huawei has already denied rumors that say the P60 line will use Huawei’s own Kirin chips

Because of the U.S. export rules, Huawei could no longer receive the Kirin chips that it designed and had manufactured by TSMC. At one time, Huawei was the Taiwan-based foundry’s second-largest customer after Apple. The rumor noted that the Kirin chips would be manufactured using a 14nm process node, far from the cutting-edge 3nm chips that TSMC and Samsung will ship next year.

The basic P60 model could be equipped with the Mate 50 Pro’s variable aperture feature

The lower the process node, the higher the transistor count on a chip. That’s important since the larger the number of transistors used on a chip, the more powerful and energy-efficient it is. Since Huawei put the kibosh on the Kirin chips rumor, the company is once again expected to utilize Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm tweaked to use 4G connectivity only. There are cases for the Mate 50 series that will allow the phone to receive 5G signals.

The tipster added that the P60 series could use the older Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip (again, the 4G version). Another rumor has the basic P60 model offering the same variable aperture as the Mate 50 Pro. This feature allows the aperture of the main camera to change from f/1.4 to f/4. In Auto mode, the aperture is selected by the phone while in Professional mode the user gets to select which aperture to use. Another rumor calls for a 64MP Telephoto camera to be used on the P60 series.

Not much is known about the Mate 60 series and frankly, we really don’t know whether Huawei plans on releasing two flagship handsets next year, especially at the same time. The company was on its way to becoming the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world until the U.S. placed it on the Entity List preventing Huawei from accessing its U.S. supply chain. The following year the aforementioned export rule change kept Huawei from receiving cutting-edge chips.