14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday evening, Huawei launched the P9, P9 Plus and the P9 Lite in South Africa. The P9 series was officially unveiled in April, but made its debut in South Africa about one month later. What’s interesting is the interview that a company executive gave to Gearburn, mentioning that Huawei will be making another Nexus smartphone this year.
Huawei General Manager for South Africa, Charlene Munilall talked about the reason as to why the Nexus 6P isn’t available in the country.
She mentioned that the Nexus smartphone is a niche product that regular consumers don’t rush to buy and “operators generally don’t take up the Nexus device”, while “the techies love it”. Then she made an interesting comment saying “We’re doing the Nexus again this year, by the way”.
Even though the comment was made by a company official, it certainly doesn’t carry as much weight as the statement that CEO Richard Yu recently made on Huawei launching a Daydream based smartphone. To add to the confusion, HTC was recently rumored to launch two Nexus smartphones this year. It remains to be seen how things play out over the next few months.
Huawei’s upcoming Nexus smartphone could support Google’s Daydream VR platform
Nevertheless, a Google Nexus 6P smartphone was benchmarked over at Geekbench in April, according to MyDrivers. The model name was the same as Huawei’s device, but it carried different specs.
The benchmarked model carried Snapdragon 820 chipset and 4GB of RAM. It ran Android N and some rumors said that the device was merely an upgraded version of the Huawei Nexus 6P, which was officially launched last year.
Considering the new information provided by the company exec, the benchmarked Nexus 6P could have actually been the second Nexus smartphone that Huawei was working on.
It could actually be the Daydream-based Huawei smartphone that the company CEO recently announced. Whatever the case, we’ll surely be hearing more about this smartphone most likely in Q3 2016, as the release date for Android N approaches.