Huawei will launch a Nova 9 Pro along with the vanilla 9 in September 2021

Huawei had intimated that it might unveil only 1 Nova 8-series successor in teasers for the device in question earlier. Now, however, the latest tip suggests there will be 2, at least: the vanilla 9 and its Pro counterpart. They have appeared in new, pre-launch 'hands-on' images that look like they might have been taken in a physical retail store.

First off, they purport to confirm that the Nova 9 and 9 Pro will be HarmonyOS devices, and will come with the 2.0.3 version of this software out of the box. It seems its UI has 'Device Information' (or demo mode) pages that reveal the 2 variants will have the same color (black, green, violet or pale blue) and RAM/storage (8/128GB or 8/256GB) options.

However, the Huawei Nova 9 is now portrayed as a device with a single, central punch-hole selfie camera, whereas the Pro gets a larger pill-shaped cut-out for dual shooters in the left corner of its display. Finally, the new Novas' alleged live-image leak suggests that the OEM was indeed able to provide them with the Snapdragon 778G SoC.

However, it is distinctly listed as a rarely-seen "4G" variant, suggesting this version of the processor lacks the 5G with which OEMs normally hype mid-range phones equipped with the silicon as a selling point. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how these putative Nova 9s do without it: last year's models had this up-to-date connectivity, after all.

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