Huawei Mate 20 Pro front panel images point to an in-screen scanner

The Huawei Mate 20 or Huawei Mate 20 Pro could be the first truly mainstream phone with an in-screen fingerprint scanner. It’s a rumor we’ve heard before and now there’s visual evidence to back it up, in the form of images supposedly showing the front panel of the phone.

Posted on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging site) and spotted by digi.tech.qq, it’s not clear whether the images show the standard Mate 20 or the Pro version.

But based on the shaky auto translation it seems to be saying that the phone will have an in-screen fingerprint scanner, which suggests this is the Mate 20 Pro model we’re looking at, as the standard Mate 20 is less likely to have this cutting-edge tech.

Other features of the phone according to this source include a curved design, visible in the images, and a large notch at the top housing a 3D-sensing camera for advanced facial recognition.

This could be the Huawei Mate 20 Pro's front panel. Credit: digi.tech.qq / Weibo

This could be the Huawei Mate 20 Pro's front panel. Credit: digi.tech.qq / Weibo

A next-gen chipset

As ever, we’d take these images with a huge pinch of salt. We could be looking at any phone here, but the claims don’t sound unbelievable, and they’re not the only Huawei Mate 20 news either, as we’ve also heard about the chipset likely to be powering it.

That specifically is the Kirin 980, which according to Globe Mobiles – citing Chinese news source CNMO – will have eight cores, with the four highest power ones being clocked at 2.8GHz (up from 2.4GHz on the Kirin 970 in the Huawei P20 range).

The chipset is said to be built on a 7nm architecture with four Cortex-A77 cores and four lower-power Cortex-A55 ones. It’s also apparently got a 24-core Mali-G72 MP24 graphics processing unit (GPU), a second-gen neural processing unit (NPU), faster image processing and an LTE modem capable of 1.6Gbps download speeds.

In short it sounds like the sort of chip we’d expect a late-2018 flagship to have. None of these features are confirmed, but we should see the Huawei Mate 20 officially in or around October or November, so we’ll know exactly how powerful it is then.

Via PocketNow

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.