Huawei Mate 9 to feature 4x Optical Zoom, Pro variant with dual-curved display

Following the rumors and leaks, Huawei’s next Mate smartphone – Mate 9, may have a sibling variant Mate 9 Pro which will reportedly feature a dual-curved display with 3D curvature at left and right sides of the display.

In addition the Pro variant of Mate 9 will serve at the resolution of Quad HD 2560×1440 pixels while the standard edition will be featuring FHD resolution. Mate 9 Pro will have Google’s Daydream VR experience and will also be running on Android 7.0 Nougat.

Dual-camera is also present on Mate 9 with same Leica branding and lens as appeared on the company’s Huawei P9 smartphone. In addition, the Mate 9 Pro reportedly will also offer 4x optical zoom and a fingerprint sensor below the rear camera.

Dual-camera configuration is rather unknown as if it will be similar to what Huawei P9 offered – an RGB and monochrome sensor. Huawei has also offered the similar setup in Honor 8 while most recently Huawei launched Honor 6X with dual camera but in different configuration. It offered a 12MP + 2MP configuration for fast focusing and depth mapping.

If we talk about optical zoom, a real optical zoom can’t be featured on a slim device. However simulation is what the manufacturers can provide quality zoom equivalent to optical zoom or much better quality than digital zoom. Considering the two configuration of Huawei’s approach, none can deliver zoom quality matchable to optical zoom. However there is another configuration of dual-camera which was offered by Apple in iPhone 7 Plus which has same sized image 12MP sensors but different lenses on top – one is wider and other is longer for tele-photo. This could provide optical zoom if an 80mm equivalent lens could fit on one camera where the other is 20mm wider – that makes a 4x optical zoom.

Another solution is a crop from higher resolution sensor – means really higher resolution like the ones in Nokia 808 PureView or Lumia 1020. However this technique could just match optical zoom or much better than digital zooming, although does is not “optical”.  There is no high resolution camera reported yet so far which unless Huawei has been doing some secret job with Leica. We really don’t know.

The thing is that you have to pay as huge amount for Mate 9 Pro as $1300 or PKR 1,30,000/- if reports are true.