Huawei CEO drops first hints on Mate 10

Richard Yu promises high screen-to-body ratio and strong cameras for Mate 10, says Huawei will be 'giving up' on low-end phones.

In an interview with Bloomberg Technology covering the company's growth over the past year, Huawei's Consumer Business Group CEO, Richard Yu, dropped some early hints on what we can expect from its next flagship phone.

"We will have an even more powerful product [than the next iPhone]" Yu said in an interview. "The Mate 10, which has much longer battery life with a full-screen display, quicker changing speed, better photographing capability and many other features that will help us compete with Apple."

A "full-screen display" likely refers to an almost bezel-free display, of the kind popularized throughout 2017. (AC understands that at least one of two planned Mate 10 variants will feature an impressive, near-bezelless screen.) Photography has been a major focus for Huawei over the past couple of years, through its partnership with Leica and move to a dual-lens strategy at the high end.

The details given by Yu don't give too much away, but it's likely the Mate 10 will also feature next-gen Huawei-made silicon — perhaps a Kirin 970 — with a probable shift to a 10nm manufacturing process enabling higher performance and lower power consumption.

At the other end of the smartphone spectrum, Yu suggested that Huawei would move away from very low-end handsets, due to unfavorable margins.

"We are giving up the very low-end devices because the margin in this is extremely low, and it's not making enough profit for us," Yu said. Huawei also intends to sustain the pace of an overseas expansion that's already taken it into Europe and other more developed markets. "The priority is Europe, China and Japan, where the economy is healthy and people are able to consume them."

Notably absent from that list is the United States, where Huawei has continually struggled to gain a foothold.

Last year's Mate 9 debuted in early November, so there's a good chance the Mate 10 will break cover sometime this fall.