The Huawei Mate 50 Pro may ship with the Snapdragon 898, but without 5G

We recently wrote how Huawei found a way to avoid the US ban, kind of. The company is sourcing chips from Qualcomm, but those without 5G connectivity. Due to the US ban, Huawei cannot even make its own HiSilicon chips any longer, so it had to find a different way of doing things. It can design its chips, but no one can manufacture them for Huawei, due to this ban. Huawei even mentioned that sourcing chips is its biggest problem. That caused some serious delays for the Huawei P50 series of devices. They were a couple of months late with the announcement, and the ‘Pro’ model didn’t even go on sale as of writing this article. It’s supposed to go on sale soon. Do note that neither of those two phones ended up being launched outside of China. Huawei is allegedly planning to announce the Huawei Mate 50 series in Q1 next year. At least the ‘Pro’ model will include Qualcomm’s next-gen chip, which hasn’t even been announced yet.

The Snapdragon 898 will be one of the most popular flagship chips next year, almost certainly. The Snapdragon 888 has been used by a lot of companies, as were its predecessors. Now, Qualcomm does sell the Snapdragon 888 bundled with a 5G modem, which is why pretty much everyone uses 5G connectivity. It’s likely Huawei will have to pay the full price for all that, and yet not be able to use 4G. Both the Huawei P50 and P50 Pro use Qualcomm’s high-end chips, by the way. Both are fueled by the Snapdragon 888, and neither supports 4G. So, this move by the company does make sense for the Mate 50 series.