Visitors looking at Huawei's new Mate 70 mobile phone inside a shop at the Wangfujing shopping area in Beijing. — AFP
Huawei Technologies Co will from next year strip its smartphones and tablets of Google’s open-source Android and move devices to homegrown software, broadcasting its ambitions to pivot away from US technology.
The company’s new flagship phone, the Mate 70, will debut HarmonyOS Next, the iteration of its operating system that does away with remnants of Android in favour of entirely indigenous tech. Announced at a live-streamed event on Tuesday, the new devices fuel Huawei’s campaign to reclaim China’s premium tier from Apple Inc and build an ecosystem without the involvement of major US tech providers.
Available on Dec 4, the Mate 70 and its Pro variants are the followup to Huawei’s most significant device in years, the Mate 60. Last year’s edition, powered by a made-in-China processor, brought Huawei back into the smartphone industry limelight and signaled its ability to work around US trade curbs designed to cut it off from the most advanced chipmaking.
HarmonyOS Next will still need another two to three months to improve the user experience, but the plan is to henceforth use it on upcoming gadgets, said Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group.
The Mate 70 series, priced from 5,499 yuan (US$760/RM3,388) for the 6.7-inch edition, will offer 40% better performance than its predecessor, in part because of HarmonyOS Next, the executive said. Yu fell short of disclosing details of the processors that power the phones.
Huawei could produce more than 10 million of the Mate 70 handsets over its life-cycle, Counterpoint analyst Zhang Mengmeng estimated.
Shenzhen-based Huawei is expected to use its latest in-house Kirin chip for the new product line, though its performance increase may be less significant than Qualcomm Inc and MediaTek Inc’s top-end offerings, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Charles Shum and Sean Chen.
"That suggests the new Huawei phone may struggle to capture the attention of non-Huawei Android users,” they wrote.
The rollout is a key part of Huawei’s attempt to break free from years of US sanctions. The company now finds itself unable to advance from the 7nm chipmaking process for its smartphone and artificial intelligence chips until at least 2026. That’s at a time when competitors like Apple are about to move to 2nm technology for mainstream products, Bloomberg News reported.
Other Chinese tech firms are also exploring ways to lessen their dependence on overseas technology. Xiaomi Corp is preparing a self-designed mobile processor for its upcoming smartphones in an effort to reduce a reliance on Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Despite Washington’s blacklisting and technical challenges, Huawei managed to grow sales over the past seven quarters, with the help of an expanding smartphone business. Its shipments recorded four consecutive quarters of at least double-digit growth in China as of September, according to research firm IDC.
Huawei on Tuesday also unveiled a number of other products including a new tablet and a 23,999-yuan (RM14,747) gold-plated smartwatch. Earlier in the fall, the company introduced the world’s first trifold phone, also powered by chips that were designed in-house. – Bloomberg
