The Huawei Mate 40 Series are official – Space Ring Design, 5G and super fast charging

Today the Huawei Mate 40 Series were finally officially announced by the Chinese giant. Over the last few weeks we saw plenty of rumors and leaks on the Mate 40, giving us a pretty clear idea of what to expect, but let's now take a look at Huawei's official information, and see where the Mate 40 shines and what it has to offer.

• Huawei Mate 40 Pro Hands-on

Huawei Mate 40 Series display, design and speakers

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro and Mate 40 Pro+ both feature what the company calls Horizon Display. Those are basically curved displays, meant to not only contribute for a pleasing design, but according to the company, make the phones more comfortable to hold. And since many of us aren't too keen on curved displays, due to the accidental touches that they often cause, Huawei reassures that the Mate 40 Series come with enhanced false-touch prevention algorithms.

The display of the Mate 40 Pro is a narrow 6.76-inch OLED one and houses a fingerprint sensor. Its resolution is 2772 x 1344 pixels and its capable of up to 90-herz refresh rate, with Huawei's CEO noting that it's not more than that for battery consumption reasons. On the screen's top-left corner is a cutout holding two selfie cameras.

A dynamic always-on display feature was also showcased during Huawei's Mate 40 Series event. It's essentially an animated always-on screen, which will be customizable and theme-able by the user. And in order to conserve battery, an additional "Eye on Display" feature was introduced, which, when enabled will only light up the screen if the user is looking at it.

The design of the Mate 40 Series is fairly standard, but distinctive enough, especially due to the curved display edges and the signature camera module on the back. The phones have volume keys on their right side, as is most common, although users could choose to use virtual volume keys on the left side instead. This could be especially convenient for left-handed people.

The Mate 40 Pro and Pro+ also hold an IP68 dust and water resistance rating, while the Mate 40 is rated at IP53. The Mate 40 Pro, which will be most widely available, weighs 212 grams.

Excitingly, the Mate 40 Pro and Pro+ also feature dual stereo speakers, which according to Huawei also produce significant bass. This alone somewhat makes up for the fact that the phones don't have a headphone jack, as movie watching and gaming will be quite more enjoyable than on single-speaker phones.

Huawei Mate 40 Series cameras

Even back when we had to rely on leaks and rumors, we knew that the Mate 40 Series would be coming with quite the interesting-looking main camera set-up. And this is it, a large, circular module holding all the cameras. Huawei calls it a Space Ring Design, which is clearly a suitable name.

Huawei's CEO announced that the cameras have also been designed with a "free-form lens", meant to fix the barrel distortion effect we often see from wide-angle cameras. For video recording, the phones also feature Super Steady stabilization and even unlimited slow motion recording at up to 240 frames-per-second. Slow motion recording will also be available on the selfie cameras. A demonstration also showcased Huawei's Dual View feature, allowing for video recording from two cameras at the same time, for example – a user could film themselves with the selfie shooter while recording another subject with the back camera.

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro also notably features a periscope telephoto camera with 10x hybrid zoom and 50x digital zoom. Videos with the main camera can be shot at up to 3840 x 2160 pixels, while photos can be as large as 8192 x 6144 pixels.

Huawei Mate 40 Series price, availability and color options

Huawei Mate 40 Series specs, software and charging speeds

The Huawei Mate 40 Pro and Mate 40 Pro+ will be packing Huawei's own Kirin 9000 processor. It's 5G-ready and can run at a clock frequency of up to 3.13GHz. Inside those two phones is also a 24-core Mali-G78 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which Huawei says it he most powerful one seen on a Huawei device to date. And with the 90Hz display on the Mate 40 Pro, along with its 240Hz touch sampling rate, it should provide for a super-smooth gaming experience.

Unsurprisingly, the Huawei Mate 40 Series will be running Android 10 with Huawei's EMUI 11 on top, without any Google services present. That means no Google Play Store, so for downloading apps, Mate 40 users will need to rely on Huawei's own AppGallery. It unfortunately lacks apps from US companies such as Google and Facebook, but still has a large number of games and popular apps, including TikTok and Viber.

As for the charging speeds, the Mate 40 Pro is capable of 66-watt wired fast charging and 50-watt wireless charging. It also conveniently comes with a 66-watt fast charging brick out of the box. Its battery is 4400 mAh.