New Leak Shows the Camera on the Huawei P50 Looks… Weird

A new set of renders posted to Voice indicate that Huawei, despite its recent struggles, is still innovating when it comes to phone and camera design. So much innovation, in fact, that the camera array on the coming P50 Pro looks very unusual.

While most of the smartphone is reported to be pretty similar to the expected — like a glass rear panel, 6.6-inch slightly curved display, metal frame, extremely slim bezels, and a centered hole-punch-style selfie camera — that all changes once the rear camera array is revealed.

While Voice has not been able to confirm any of the specifications for the P50 Pro camera, it has released multiple renders of what it says the rear camera array will look like: a giant, oval-shaped hump that hides the actual camera systems and takes up a huge portion of the backside of the smartphone.

Large, impressive-looking camera arrays aren’t foreign to Huawei products. Last year’s Mate 40 Pro was equipped with a giant Leica-branded, centered, circular camera array that occupies about a quarter of the entire rear of that device. ScreenRant categorized the device as the best smartphone for photography last year thanks to its excellent integration of computational photography technology and its triple-lens 40-megapixel rear camera.

The renders for the P50 Pro seen above come from Steve Hemmerstoffer, who is characterized as a “reliable” leaker of mobile devices. It’s unclear how many individual cameras the P50 Pro will have, but since the last generation had four, it’s likely that this new device will sport at least that many behind the unusual design.

If this rumor holds true, Huawei likely chose this highly-unusual rear camera array design because it knows that it will become a major talking point, and media attention is something Huawei desperately needs right now. Over the last year, Huawei’s market share in its native China has tumbled from a commanding 41% to a paltry 16% as Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, and even Xiaomi continue to make huge improvements to devices. In order to stay afloat while battling a parts sourcing problem thanks to its economic blacklisted status with the United States, Huawei will need to get as much attention on its next flagship device as it can.