The Huawei Mate 40 will hit the market on October 22nd,...

What could be the last of the really great Huawei phones to make its way outside of China will be revealed later this month. According to the official Huawei Twitter account, the Huawei Mate 40 will hit the market on October 22nd.

Huawei has never been shy about cheering its upcoming phone releases or naming them well in advance of the actual launch events. This was absolutely the case with the Huawei Mate 40 series. The company announced that it will officially post them in a tweet on October 22, 2020:

For once we don’t have to get up early in the morning. CEST at 2 p.m. – that is Central European Summer Time – corresponds to 11 p.m. on the east side of the country and even friendlier at 9 p.m. on the west side.

The Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro are expected to run on Huawei’s own Kirin 990 SoC, and it is quite likely that this will be the last high-end Huawei chip that the Chinese manufacturer is looking at for some Time can access.

This is because, like the ban on not bundling Google apps and services on its AOSP Android phones, ordering semiconductor parts from companies that rely on US technology is also prohibited. Huawei designs its own Kirin chips, but the actual manufacturing process is at TSMC from Taiwan using US technology.

This has created a situation that almost certainly means the very last of the Kirin 990 chips that TSMC produced for Huawei – production lines reportedly closed in mid-September – will be converted into a very limited number of Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro- Cell phones could flow. and maybe a fancy, expensive Porsche Design model too, if previous Mate series releases are any indication.

Huawei Mate 40 in Australia

Whether we actually see the Mate 40 or the Mate 40 Pro in Australi is a little more complicated. There’s a big question mark as Huawei hasn’t been able to have any major Google apps and services on its phones since 2019.

The last “full” Android flagship Huawei sold in Australia was the award-winning Huawei P30 Pro. Since then, however, it has only been limited to an AOSP version of Android without Google Apps and its own Huawei AppGallery instead of the Google Play Store.

This resulted in some really great hardware being launched locally in Australia and severely limited access to the apps you actually need on a premium phone.

That’s really polite. AppGallery is full of suspicious rip-off apps, and Huawei’s other solution is to sideload apps. This approach is incredibly risky if you aren’t particularly careful about where you get your APKs from.

The geopolitics of the whole situation aside, it’s a shame just because Huawei has made some of the best and most interesting smartphones in the past few years, especially if you’re a fan of very good camera technology.

I reached out to Huawei Australia to see if there are any current plans to bring the Mate 40 series phones to Australia and will update when and if they respond.