Huawei Mate 30 could be an all-screen beauty to take down the Note 10

Huawei looks to be following an industry trend of introducing pop-up selfie cameras in order to banish unsightly notches and punch-holes from phone screens and that offers a tantalising prospect for its next flagship phone, the Huawei Mate 30, and potentially bad news for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.

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According to Mobielkopen, the Chinese manufacturer is gearing up to launch the Huawei P Smart Z, which will feature a selfie-camera set-up that follows the trend set by the likes of Oppo and Vivo. This news follows an earlier report by LetGoDigital that Huawei had trademarked the brand name "P Smart Z".

Specs-wise, the P Smart Z looks set to feature a Kirin 710 chipset, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage and a 4,000mAh battery, while the 6.59-inch screen has a Full HD+ resolution of 2340 x 1080 and a pixel density of 391 pixels-per-inch, which puts it firmly in the mid-range camp.

There's another company that recently said it would introduce new features to its mid-range smartphones first: Samsung. And true to its word, earlier this month it launched the Samsung Galaxy A80 with a rotating camera that doubles-up as a rear-mounted shooter and selfie set-up. We're expecting the same technology to make the jump to the flagship Note 10 in August.

If Huawei follows a similar tack, we could see the company ditch the camera notch on the Mate 30, making it the firm's first all-screen flagship phone. Given the Mate 30 already looks set to be arriving in a 5G variant, it could be a very compelling upgrade over this years five-star P30 Pro.

But there's another, equally compelling, scenario: given the Mate 30 has a likely release date of October 2019, does that allow enough time for Huawei to develop an in-screen camera?

That's a long shot, but it would be one in the eye for Samsung, which has already confirmed that it is planning such a feature. Vice President of Samsung’s R&D group Yang Byung-duk admitted in a briefing in March 2019 that Samsung is still two or more years off producing such a screen – so if Huawei can get there first with the Mate 30 in October, or even the Huawei P40 Pro in March 2020, it'd be quite a coup. 

Given the strides that Huawei is making in other areas at the moment, most noticeably in mobile camera tech, it's quite conceivable that it can win that particular race.

Lead image credit: LetsGoDigital