Renders of Huawei's P40 Pro show a camera bump with Leica branding that has five lenses at the back and two selfie cameras at the front, but no headphone jack
Seven cameras, zero Google apps? — New renders from Evan “Evleaks” Blass give us what may well be our best look yet at Huawei's next flagship phone.
Context & Ripple Effects
Evan Blass's renders extend a leak-to-launch pattern Huawei has run for years: the Mate 10 Pro renders with f/1.6 Leica-branded cameras in 2017 preceded the P20 Pro's triple-camera debut, and leaked P30 Pro specs turned into the shipped quad-camera, 10x-zoom P30 Pro at €999. Five rear lenses plus two selfie cameras would be the next rung on that ladder.
The timing matters because this camera escalation lands just as Huawei's international software position collapses — the P40 ships without any Google services, and later hands-on coverage of the P40 Pro Plus found the camera focus undermined by exactly that absence.
First-order effects
- Huawei is betting the P40 Pro's selling point on optics — seven cameras with Leica branding — because Google apps are off the table, while buyers lose the headphone jack that earlier P-series flagships retained.
- Leica's brand appears on both the rear array and the selfie pair, deepening a co-marketing arrangement that has now spanned every P-series generation from the P20 Pro onward.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing at the €999-and-up flagship tier face a raised hardware bar: matching Huawei now means matching multi-lens arrays, since camera count is the one axis where Huawei can still differentiate without Google's software.
- Camera module and sensor suppliers gain leverage as lens count per flagship climbs from three (P20 Pro) to four (P30 Pro) to seven, concentrating BOM cost in imaging hardware.
Third-order effects
- If hardware excellence cannot overcome missing Google services — the verdict the P40 Pro Plus hands-on reached — the structural lesson is that ecosystem access, not spec escalation, decides international smartphone competitiveness, pushing Huawei toward markets and supply chains less dependent on US software; Nikkei's teardown work showing Chinese-made components in Huawei flagships rising from 32% to 57% points the same direction.
- A bifurcated Android market takes shape: one tier defined by camera and silicon specs, another by services integration, with brands increasingly forced to pick a side.
The trend: Flagship competition is splitting into a hardware-specs race that Huawei can still win and an ecosystem-services race it currently cannot, with camera arrays becoming the differentiator of last resort.