Epic Xiaomi leak puts Huawei P40 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra on notice

Much has been rightly made of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra's impressive new 100MP camera sensor, and the first reviews to land for the Huawei P40 Pro have been very praise-filled in regards to its camera system, too.

However, it looks like both those phones are going to have to face up to a very powerful new rival later in 2020, and one that has a camera sensor that outguns them both.

That rival? A brand new Xiaomi phone. That sensor? Only the world's first 144MP camera sensor, which according to the fresh leak will likely either appear in the Xiaomi Mi 10S Pro or Mi CC10 Pro smartphones in Q4 this year.

The leak, which was reported on first by respected phone industry website gsmarena and is based on the above Tweet, tallies with previous reports that Samsung had ordered a powerful new camera sensor to built and that "Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo wish to include the hardware in their upcoming flagship smartphones". That report also indicated that Xiaomi would be the first company to make use of it, with a phone launch in Q4 2020 coming with the new sensor installed.

Now, while a large main camera sensor does not an all-round quality camera system make, it really does help, and when the Xiaomi phone launches with this 144MP sensor, it will outgun Samsung's Galaxy S20 Ultra main sensor by 44MP and the Huawei flagship by a whopping 94MP. On paper at least, those numbers don't look good for Xiaomi's rivals, and especially so as Xiaomi is famous for charging much less than them for its flagships.

From T3's perspective this seems to be another strong move by Xiaomi, who has been killing it over the past couple of years in terms of their flagship phone offerings.  The Chinese maker has been delivering premium phones with advanced features, and doing so for a fraction of the price of other makers, Chinese or otherwise. After all, there's a reason the Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro currently sits snugly in our guide to the best phones.

Hopefully we will hear more about this new camera sensor soon, as too what other handsets intend to use it going forward, which should at least include a phone in next year's Samsung Galaxy S30 range according to industry whispers.

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