Rumor | Huawei Mate 50 series will debut as inaugural XMAGE flagship smartphones in August 2022

The Huawei Mate series of premium (and occasionally super-premium) phablets is now rumored to bounce back with more round, centrally-oriented camera humps in 2022. Then again, the hardware feature is also expected to get more up to date by housing much more OPPO/OnePlus-like individual lenses this time around.

According to The Factory Manager's Classmate, an actively Huawei-focused leaker on Weibo, the Mate 50 series renders that point to this design could be amended to include yet more of the spec-touting branding that has come to adorn so many high-end smartphone cameras as of late. In fact, if the latest rumors are right, we may already know what some of it will read in the case of the upcoming devices.

The tipster purports to reveal that the Mate 50 and 50 Pro are definitely on the way with "new things in terms of imaging", thus inviting speculation that they will be the first-gen XMAGE smartphones. Therefore, the Mate 40-series successors might represent the dawn of their OEM's attempts to stay ahead of the mobile imaging game in its post-Leica era. 

The Factory Manager's Classmate has yet to nominate any specs for the upcoming smartphones, other than to endorse a potential upgrade to HarmonyOS 3.0. Then again, they will apparently be more powerful than the P50 series in general. However, as they are likely to be restricted to 4G/LTE connectivity, their options to supplant Huawei's current flagships might be limited.

In any case, the Mate 50 series is now slated to debut by August 2022, now that Huawei's supply issues have alleviated to some extent.