The unveiling of Huawei's next 5G tablet is just weeks away

Huawei is rumored to unveil its first flagship phone line of 2021 on April 17th. The P50, P50 Pro, and the P50 Pro+ will be available in limited quantities because of the revised U.S. chip export rule that went into effect this past September. Under the new rule, foundries that use U.S. technology to manufacture chips are not allowed to ship them to Huawei without permission from the U.S. Commerce Department. As a result, Huawei's inventory of its cutting-edge 5nm Kirin 9000 chips might be too low to make a full production run of its "P" series camera-focused flagship line.

What Huawei plans on doing is using a "light" version of the Kirin 9000 chipset called the Kirin 9000E on the P50 model. While the CPU and GPU used on both chips are the same, the Neural Processing Unit of the Kirin 9000 includes two large cores and one micro core. The Kirin 9000E has just one large NPU core and one micro core. And while both chips use the Mali-G78 GPU, the Kirin 9000 version of the GPU has 24 cores while the 9000E uses a version of the Mali-G78 GPU with 22 cores.

Not much is known about the P50 series yet in terms of precise specs although a Twitter tipster said last month that selling points for the line include the quality of the display, a new ultra sensing camera system, and gaming capabilities. The P50 will sport a 6.1-inch screen while a 6.6-inch and a 6.8-inch display will be found on the P50 Pro, and the P50 Pro+ respectively.

There is another device that could accompany the three P50 units expected to be unveiled next month. The Huawei MatePad Pro 2 5G would be the company's next flagship tablet and will also be powered by the Kirin 9000 and run on PadOS. The latter is based on Huawei's own HarmonyOS operating system. Two different models are expected, one with a 12.2-inch display sourced by Hua Xing, and another variant containing a 12.6-inch Samsung screen. Both will deliver a 120Hz refresh rate that updates the screen 120 times a second resulting in buttery smooth scrolling and animation.

Other rumored specs include a battery larger than the 7250mAh battery that powers last year's Mate Pad Pro, 40W fast charging, and a quad-speaker setup. The tablet would feature support for 5G connectivity.