Huawei started sending out invites for the September 1 event a few days back and everyone started speculating that the phone released at that event should be the Huawei Mate 9 flagship. However, according to the company’s usually release schedule Mate 9 should be released only by the end of the year and this is exactly what one of the managers within the company confirmed today.
Huawei’s Mobile Product line manager, Bruce Lee revealed today that Mate 8 was listed only by December last year and hence, Mate 9 will not be released so early. This brings us to the question, what to expect from the event in September? Like last year, Huawei could unveil the brand new Huawei Mate S2 flagship at the event, that should precede the launch of the Mate 9. In fact, we actually may have seen the Mate S2 model, as recently a variant of the Mate 8 flagship with advanced Force Touch features was spotted on TENAA. It came with the same specs as the Mate 8 as well as the design.
However, it would make even more sense for Huawei to upgrade the specs on the Mate S2. For example, the company could debut the new Kirin 960 chipset in the new smartphone which is rumored to come with ARM’s Artemis cores (next gen of Cortex A72) in combination with low-power Cortex A53 cores. Further, the GPU should be upgraded to improve graphics performance of the chipset. Other possible features of the Kirin 960 include Cat. 12 LTE, CDMA support, and 16nm manufacturing node.
RELATED: Huawei Mate 9 Said To Feature 20MP dual cameras
In case you remember, last years Mate S was water resistant. We hope that this year the company carries forward this feature to the new Mate S2 version. While the S2 should most likely feature a dual camera setup, we are still not sure whether they would be 20MP Leica certified setup, which the Mate 9 is expected to feature. With upgraded specs, the Mate S2 can still be a powerful competitor to the upcoming iPhone 7 Plus and Galaxy Note 7 models.
