Huawei Mate 10 Pro news: AT&T to carry Huawei's flagship

Reuters/Aly Song
People walk past a sign board of Huawei at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Asia 2016 in Shanghai, China May 12, 2016.

Months after rumors that AT&T will be selling a flagship phone from Huawei, XDA Developers has found a code which indicates that a version of the Huawei Mate 10 will indeed be sold through AT&T. This comes after the firmware in question exhibited a Mate 10 Pro loaded with AT&T software and apps.

Having sold 39 million phones in the third quarter of this year, Huawei is the third biggest phone brand in the world. A large part of the brand's sales come from the homeland of Chine, but an IDC Research released last week shows that they sold only seven million phones less than the world's second largest brand, Apple.

The Huawei Mate 10 Pro sports a 6-inch display with an 18:9 ratio and is the company's attempt to compete with big-screen phones like the Samsung Galaxy S8, Google Pixel 2 XL, and the Apple iPhone 8 Plus. Similar to most flagship phones this year, it features a large screen with minimal bezel. It is powered by Huawei's very own Kirin 970 processor which roughly compares to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. The neural processing unit will allegedly improve the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of the Mate 10 Pro as well as its battery performance.

Huawei was also one of the first companies to shift to the recent dual-camera craze. The Huawei P9 was equipped with two Leica cameras on its back and was released months before Apple's iPhone 7 Plus.

The Chinese company has been selling its phones in the U.S. since 2014, but only its budget phones and almost exclusively online. According to Counterpoint Research Analyst Neil Shah, nine out of 10 phones in the U.S. are bought through carriers, so a partnership with AT&T would mean that the company is having its first real shot at cracking the market. Although neither Huawei nor AT&T have given comments about the rumors, it expected to be announced sooner or later with the discovery of the code.