On March 27th, Huawei will officially unveil the Huawei P20, Huawei P20 Pro, and Huawei P20 Lite. The P20 Lite has already gone on sale in a few countries, while the P20 and P20 Pro have had nearly everything leaked about them. We’ve seen leaked press renders, manuals, and even official wallpapers in the wild. As the launch day approaches, we now have new information to share about the devices, both from our own analysis as well as from Roland Quandt from WinFuture. In summary, WinFuture has leaked exact specifications of the P20 Pro’s triple camera setup, while we have obtained information about the P20 and P20 Pro’s super slow motion feature which competes with the slow motion recording on the Samsung Galaxy S9.
First, let’s talk about what WinFuture has disclosed today. The publication has detailed most of what’s new for the highest-end Huawei P20 Pro model. According to WinFuture, the P20 Pro will offer triple Leica-branded camera sensors on the rear. The main sensor offers a whopping 40MP while another sensor offers 8MP 5X hydrid zoom and another sensor captures at 20MP in black and white. In addition, WinFuture notes that the P20 Pro combines sensors with apertures of f/1.6 and f/2.4, though it is unclear which sensor works at these aperture values.
Huawei P20 Pro Triple Camera Setup. Source: WinFuture.
On the front, both the P20 and the P20 Pro will have a 24MP camera. There’s also something called a “Light Fusion” system in place for both the front-facing camera and the rear-facing cameras, though it’s unclear what this will be used for.
The WinFuture report goes into more detail on the RAM, storage, pricing, colors, and other aspects of the devices, so we recommend you read their full report here.
Now that we’ve discussed the main camera features of the devices, we can offer our own information on top of the WinFuture report. Yesterday, a user on Twitter posted a video of what appeared to be a promotion for the upcoming P20 devices. This video is clearly promoting a slow motion capability on the devices, but the video did not mention a resolution or frame rate. After digging through the Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro firmware files (as we have done many times in the past), we can offer exact information on the P20/P20 Pro slow motion feature.
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— Ricciolo (@Ricciolo1) March 18, 2018
The following information is based on firmware files obtained by @FunkyHuawei, the man behind the FunkyHuawei.club service, which allows users to update, unbrick, or rebrand Huawei and Honor phones for a fee. He has provided access to these firmware files exclusively to XDA-Developers.
Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro Slow Motion Recording
Although the Sony Xperia XZ Premium was the first to feature 960fps recording, the world didn’t really pay attention to such a feature until Samsung did it. The Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ offer super slow motion video recording (960fps) at 720p resolution. Now, it appears that Huawei will follow suit as we performed a teardown of the EMUI 8.1 camera app taken from the P20 and P20 Pro’s firmware files and discovered explicit references to a 960fps recording mode at 720p resolution.
The above code is for a class called “SuperSlowMotionResolutionExtension” and one of the methods called “setSupportedHighSpeedData” shows that “1280x720_960” is a supported video mode. That means that the Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro (the code is present in both phones’ firmware files) will support 720p@960fps, just like the Samsung Galaxy S9 series.
Thus, it looks like the Huawei P20 will match the Samsung Galaxy S9 at least in high frame rate recording. Huawei reportedly canceled their P20 unveiling at Mobile World Congress because of Samsung after all, so it’s important for the phone to not only offer features comparable to those found on its main competitor, but to go even further in other aspects. Given the insane camera specifications leaked by WinFuture today, it’s clear that Huawei’s main focus is on the camera improvements. Although, we should mention that the recently announced Sony Xperia XZ2 and Xperia XZ2 Compact offer super slow motion 960fps recording at 1080p resolution, so Samsung and Huawei still have some catching up to do.