The Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max is more like a camera you can turn into a phone

Huawei has announced a new smartphone, the Mate 90 Pro Max, offering a complete camera unit as an accessory.

There's been a recent trend of offering companion lenses for smartphones, with the likes of Oppo and Vivo selling pocketable zoom lenses to convert the camera on the back of the phone.

Huawei has gone one stage further though, basically selling a whole camera, where the smartphone becomes the display and controls. It's called the Z10 and it's a lot like the Sony Cyber-shot QX lens cameras from over a decade ago.

Starting with the phone, the Mate 90 Pro Max is a flagship level device, running on the homegrown Kirin 9050 Pro chip, with a 6.9-inch display, 6,800mAh battery and an IP69 rating – so far, so smartphone.

The cameras are comprehensive with a 50-megapixel main, 40-megapixel ultrawide and a 200-megapixel telephoto with 4x optical zoom. Again, that's fairly typical flagship level stuff.

Then we get to the Z10, which is an accessory that attaches to the rear of the phone, covering its native camera and offering a full lens and sensor setup of its own. Unlike the recent solutions from rivals, this isn't about converting the phone's camera, it's about hijacking the phone's screen and power to run the camera accessory.

The Z10 camera itself has a proper zoom lens, running from 24mm wide out to 240mm telephoto (that's 10x), while feeding into a 50-megapixel stacked CMOS RYYB 1-inch sensor. That means it has a much better spread of glass than a typical smartphone, even one with a teleconverter lens slapped on the back.

It offers an aperture range from f/2.0-f/4.5, weighs 346g and will accept 70mm filters.

The Z10 connects to the Mate 90 Pro Max using the HyperClick mount, which appears just to twist into place and lock, for a seamless experience.

What we don't know is how the rest of it unfolds. Previously, the Sony QX system was scuppered because it relied on a Wi-Fi connection between lens and camera that was terribly slow, the controls were poor and it just wasn't worth the effort to get a photo out of it.

Things have changed a lot and it's likely that Huawei will offer a much better experience. However, it begs the question of why, when this solution is relatively bulky, you'd choose to use your phone with an accessory, rather than just buying a camera?

Still, given Huawei's regional restrictions, this is only likely to be available in China, with the phone costing around $1,400 and the camera around $900.