An alleged Huawei Mate 20 or Mate 20 Pro was spotted at IFA 2018

What do you do when an employee needs to bring a pre-production device out in public? You cover it up in a thick protective case and hope that nobody notices it. With how many technology journalists are at IFA 2018, it would be really hard to hide such an unannounced device from view. Indeed, someone (presumably a Huawei employee judging by the armband) was seen walking around with what’s either the Huawei Mate 20 or the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, as spotted by Spanish technology blog Teknofilo.

Photos of the alleged Huawei Mate 20 or Mate 20 Pro via Teknofilo

As you can see in the images above, the smartphone is protected by a thick case which makes it really hard to see its design. If it wasn’t for its unique triple rear camera arrangement, this device would have probably gone unnoticed. But thanks to the renders of the Huawei Mate 20 that we published earlier this month, the eagle-eyed observers at Teknofilo were able to spot this device from a mile away.

Render of the rear of the Huawei Mate 20. For more renders, check out George Burduli’s coverage here.

Unfortunately, we are unable to confirm whether this device spotted at IFA 2018 is the Huawei Mate 20 or Huawei Mate 20 Pro. From our earlier leak, we determined that the larger Huawei Mate 20 Pro will have an in-display fingerprint scanner compared to the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner on the regular Huawei Mate 20. However, since our source was unable to provide us unobscured photos of the Mate 20 (much like the device shown in the real-life pictures above), we were unable to show what the fingerprint scanner looks like in our render. At least these photos corroborate our render on what the triple camera configuration on the rear would look like.

Since our first look at the Huawei Mate 20, however, there have been other leaks that corroborated our renders. A user on Weibo posted a photo of a pre-production Mate 20 unit that matches what we’ve seen. At IFA, Frandroid spotted a triple camera setup that looks suspiciously like the camera setup shown in our Mate 20 render.

We have less than 2 months until Huawei unveils the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. Huawei confirmed during their announcement of the HiSilicon Kirin 980 that the Mate 20 series will be unveiled on October 16th at an event in London. If we learn more details about this device that we think you should know, we’ll let you know.

Note: Huawei has stopped providing official bootloader unlock codes for its devices. Therefore, the bootloader of the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro cannot be unlocked, which means that users cannot flash Magisk/TWRP/Project Treble Generic System Images/AOSP-based custom ROMs.