Huawei Mate 30 Pro leak shows off beguiling rear camera array

The Huawei Mate 30 range of phones is – following the seeming lifting of the ban on the Chinese phone maker by United States President Donald Trump – now once more lining up to be one of, if not the, biggest launches of the year, with the flagship Mate 30 Pro primed to go toe-to-toe with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Pro.

This powerful flagship, which was previously depicted in the Huawei Mate 30 Pro video below, is rumoured to come with a 6.71-inch AMOLED 90Hz display, Kirin 985 SoC, 4,200mAh battery and Balong 5000 5G modem. The phone also notably featured a futuristic looking rectangular rear camera array.

Now, though, a new image that originated in a Weibo post by user @ichangezone and originally reported on by PhoneArena, has revealed a different Huawei Mate 30 Pro design. This look, which can only be seen from the rear, does not have a rectangular camera array, but a centre-mounted circular one, with what appears to be a quad-camera system and flash unit contain within.

The full design can be viewed below:

On close analysis it appears that this Huawei Mate 30 Pro features a "5x optical zoom" telephoto lens, however whether or not the Chinese maker's advanced periscope camera (as debuted on the Huawei P30 Pro) is included is unclear. What is clear, though, is that the array seems to sit nearly flush against the backplate, which looks markedly better than the pronounced bump we've seen in recent new iPhone 11 and Google Pixel 4 leaks.

Our take here at T3 is that this latest leak should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt. A basically anonymous image drop on a Chinese social network that shows only a single, flat-on image of the back of a phone is definitely not something worth hanging too much authority on for sure.

However, the fact that both Google and Apple are currently predicted to implement the sort of rounded-corner square rear camera arrays that Huawei did last year with its Mate 20 series, definitely could lead the Chinese maker to move on in a different direction to remain distinctive in terms of design.

And, well, the one thing that this camera array is is distinctive, with a futuristically beguiling pattern of lenses looking like nothing else out there on the market today.

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