The Huawei Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro are expected to be officially unveiled in the next couple of months. Huawei being Huawei, cameras will probably be a key feature of the phones, and we just got an early look at what the rear camera modules are going to look like.
Posted on the Weibo social network in China and spotted by GSMArena, the modules show room for four or five separate camera components, surrounded by a circle pattern, then surrounded by a square. That 'island' design matches up neatly with last year's devices.
The Huawei Mate 30 and the Mate 30 Pro had circular camera bumps, but it's possible that the square part of the component in the images below will be hidden in the casing. We'll have to wait until the Mate 40 phones actually appear to know for sure.
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Meanwhile, the Huawei P40 and the P40 Pro released earlier this year went for a rectangular camera array on the rear, so it would appear that Huawei is sticking to a design largely similar to previous models when it comes to the Mate series.
More interesting than the design of the module, is what exactly Huawei is going to do with the cameras packed inside. Both the leaked Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro have a '3D' label on the back, which we presume refers to a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor for judging distances in a scene with invisible laser light.
The Mate 40 Pro module also has a rectangular hole in the middle, which is presumably for a periscope zoom camera. A periscope camera would be a first for the Mate series, though the P40 Pro did have periscope zoom and a ToF sensor.
While it's difficult to be sure, these modules look like authentic leaks – they certainly match up with unofficial renders we saw earlier this month, renders that suggested the Mate 40 Pro would indeed come with an extra camera lens to make use of.
Huawei has never been shy about pushing camera technology forward – it was one of the first to market with a dual-lens camera in 2016, and introduced periscope zoom cameras to the world last year on the P30 Pro series. No doubt Huawei's next flagship phones will pack in plenty of innovative camera tech too.
