The biggest smartphone innovation in years won’t be ready for 2020 after all

A few days ago, we saw a rather unexpected leak that said one of the most exciting Android handsets of 2020 will feature the biggest smartphone innovation in years. Out of nowhere, Huawei France posted on Twitter content that said the P40 series will come with a graphene battery inside, which would not only be smaller than regular lithium-ion batteries, but it’d also pack bigger charge and support faster wireless speeds. Huawei deleted those tweets, but not before someone saved it. We’ve been expecting smartphone makers to adopt graphene batteries for years, with Samsung being one of the rumored candidates for the change. It turns out the technology isn’t ready for 2020, after all.

Huawei France deleted the tweet because it wasn’t offering any official information about the P40 series. Instead, it apparently leaked to a P40 Pro rumor online, which it decided to publish, for whatever reason. The update comes from French blog FrAndroid, which got direct confirmation from Huawei France.

Huawei France also said that it won’t comment on rumors and speculations, which is the regular policy of any smartphone vendor out there — or any company that has to deal with rumors about unreleased products. But, again, it’s incredibly strange to see them post a rumor about an unreleased product on an official social account.

Separately, Huawei’s vice president of mobile Li Xiaolong told China Business News (via ITHome), that the news was false.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see graphene batteries in phones in the near future, it just won’t happen in 2020, according to some industry experts. Per GSM Arena, those experts say the first types of graphene batteries should arrive in 2021 at the earliest.