Huawei Launches Three New Nova Phones

Huawei is having a big day in China today. The phone maker has unveiled three new phones at a launch event in China today, and they are all part of the Nova line. Huawei detailed the specs of the new devices at the event but didn’t really mention much about the software powering the devices.

The new Nova 5 Pro is the flagship device out of the three — it has a huge 6.39-inch OLED display, a 32MP camera for selfies, and a 4-camera setup on the back. The 4-camera setup consists of a 48MP main shooter, a 2MP depth sensor, a 2MP macro camera, and a 16MP wide-angle camera. It’s also powered by the Kirin 980 chipset, with 8 gigs of RAM, and up to 256GB of storage. All of this is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery which supports Huawei’s fast-charging tech. The device starts at around $435, or CNY2,999, and will be available on June 28.

And then there’s the regular Nova 5 — it comes with Huawei’s new Kirin 810 chipset, and that’s really the main difference between the Nova 5 Pro and the regular Nova 5. The new Kirin 810 chipset comes with two Cortex-A76 powerful cores clocked at 2.27GHz, six Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.88GHz and a Mali-G52 MP6 GPU. The device will be available for purchase in July, starting at CNY2,799 (roughly $407). Huawei is only making one variant of the device that comes with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage, unlike the slightly more powerful Nova 5 Pro.

And lastly, there’s the lower end Nova 5i. It comes with a slightly different notch design on the display, the Kirin 710 processor,  a 4-camera setup on the back (24MP main camera, 8MP wide-angle camera, 2MP depth and 2MP macro cameras). The device comes with the same battery capacity as the other Nova 5 devices, but for RAM and memory you get up to 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. The device starts at CNY1,999 (roughly $290) for the 6GB RAM variant.

The new devices do look pretty solid on paper, but Huawei still has a massive problem: the U.S. government ban that’s led to Google ending business with the phone maker. Huawei obviously won’t have access to Google services like the Play Store on its future phones, and the company’s contingency plan remains a big mystery. GSM Arena reported that the didn’t say a single word about the OS powering the devices. The company did say it sold 100 million phones so far this year, but without knowing exactly OS and services will power the new phones, customers probably won’t be too confident spending money on the company’s new products.