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Huawei P50 Pro might offer Android, Harmony OS variants

By Ewdison Then/

In just under two days, Samsung will be announcing 2021's first premium smartphones, the Galaxy S21. It's super early schedule is supposedly meant to give both Apple and Huawei shorter opportunities in the market. Of course, Huawei already has its own problems to worry about but it's still trying to prove that it's business as usual. In fact, the Huawei P50 Pro might still arrive on time, but it will be a rather complicated affair as far as its software goes.

That Huawei will be replacing Android with its own Harmony OS, Hongmeng OS in China, is really more a question of when rather than if. It has already started deploying its new platform on IoT devices but has only recently opened up version 2.0 for smartphones. It may be far too early to expect it on the company's next flagship but it seems that Huawei wants to give buyers a foretaste anyway.

According to a leak, the Huawei P50 Pro will come in at least three flavors. The one in China will ship with Harmony OS, which shouldn't be much of a problem as the country has been deprived of Google apps and services since forever anyway. Global markets, however, will supposedly have a choice between having Android or Harmony OS pre-installed.

It seems strange that Huawei would be offering two different operating systems on the same phone, but that might not exactly be true. Developers have discovered that Harmony OS 2.0, at least in its beta form, is pretty much Android underneath. Huawei, however, insists that Harmony OS isn't just a copy of Android or even iOS.

The leak also says that the Huawei P50 Pro may run on a Kirin 9000E and have 6 to 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM, the latter a bit of a disappointment for a pro-level phone. That said, the penta-camera setup on the back could make up for all of that, especially if it delivers the same quality photos and videos that the company's smartphones are famous for.

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