Huawei Mate 40 pricing leak sounds ridiculous and likely

By Ewdison Then/

Huawei is set to announce its last major smartphone of the year in a few days and, unlike previous generations of Huawei flagships, very little has been leaked about the Mate 40 series. Perhaps there's not much to leak about in the first place but the ones that do get out are admittedly curious. Going beyond the design, part of which was already teased by Huawei itself, new information has surfaced that puts the smartphone in a not so positive light but one that's most likely close to the real deal, unfortunately.

Cutting to the chase, the Huawei Mate 40 series will be excessively expensive, at least according to a new leak. The base model alone will cost 1,100 EUR, roughly $1,300, while the Mate 40 Pro will supposedly go up to 1,400 EUR, around $1,650. With smartphone prices rising higher and higher even despite the current global economy, that's not much of a surprise but a few factors definitely make it sound like Huawei is asking too much.

On the one hand, the specs for the phone might justify the price jump. Huawei does make some of the best camera smartphones in the market and there's little doubt the Mate 40 series will take that to the next level yet again. Whether the design on the Huawei Mate 40, in contrast to the Pro model, ruins that appeal will be a matter of personal taste.

And then there's the case of the Kirin 9000 which early benchmarks show to surpass the current generation of Snapdragon 865 and Exynos 1080. A new leak reveals that the chip will have 24 "compute units", which may translate to CPU cores. That said, those cores are apparently clocked lower, though, resulting in actually poorer performance than what it may be theoretically capable of.

The big question, however, is whether all these make it worth that high price tag. Especially when you consider that the Huawei Mate 40 won't be shipping with Google Play apps and services and that the company's future is in limbo at this point, it might be asking consumers to make an expensive leap of faith at a time when many need reliability and stability.

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