Owing to the ongoing global chip shortage and U.S. sanctions, Huawei was forced to roll out its latest P50 series without 5G. The lineup is powered by the LTE versions of the Snapdragon 888 and Kirin 9000. But Kirin silicon is in short supply since Huawei can no longer manufacture its chips. A phone leaker based in China reports that going forward, Huawei plans to switch to Qualcomm for its mainstream smartphones, including the upcoming Huawei Mate 50 series.
The leak surfaced on the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo. As per the tip, Huawei is strengthening its partnership with Qualcomm. By December 2021, the chip supply should be enough to power the brand’s entire smartphone catalog.
The next-gen foldable Mate X and Huawei Mate 50 Pro and the other Mate siblings will also adopt Qualcomm chips. Plus, the already-released Huawei P50 series could lose the Kirin variants, leaving the Snapdragon editions to become mainstream. But the foldable and traditional Mate flagships will use the unannounced mobile platform, Snapdragon 898.
No word on the Huawei mobile price yet, Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 5G is rumored to launch before 2021 ends. It’s unclear if the Huawei Mate 50 will debut with the 5G-enabled version because Qualcomm is only licensed to ship 4G chips to Huawei.
So the Mate flagship could be delayed until the Snapdragon 898 4G comes out. The source expects its launch in the second quarter of 2022. In either case, the new HarmonyOS (also based on Android) should run on these phones out of the box.