back to article The new Huawei is going upmarket, but the old Huawei still threatens

For a company that just four years ago vowed not to "engage in significant advertising campaigns", Huawei now puts on vast displays of wealth and technological prowess. Yesterday's extravaganza drew over 5,000 to London's Excel centre to see four new phones and two wearables, ranging from €99 to €2,099. Each event is a no- …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The real challenge for Huawei

    Is not merely humanising its products, it is genuine, groundbreaking innovation. 80,000 STEM graduates, and they're STILL copying Apple, even down to the designations applied to their phones, notches, loss of 3.5mm sockets etc. Maybe the real innovation they keep for the home market, or maybe they struggle for whatever reason to come up with the sort of ideas that seem obvious afterwards, but nobody sees before the innovator.

    Arguably Apple have merely refined rather than innovated under Tim Cook, and if that continues (and nobody else offers bold innovation) then perhaps Huawei don't have to worry.

    1. 0laf
      Meh

      Re: The real challenge for Huawei

      I don't think anyone really has much innovation on the go. It's just incremental improvements in various areas and has been like this for quite a few years.

      When these phones make the leap to a proper Continuum like switch being both mobile and desktop as and when needed that might (might) kick things up a gear.

      Same with the flexible/rollable displays that are always just a little away.

      But even if you look at scifi (The Expanse), even with hundreds of years of fantasy R&D the characters are still carrying little rectangular screens that process data, take pictures and process data. Maybe we're at the end point for mobile coms until they get imbedded into our heads.

      Even with Cloud doing the heavy lift we'll still have little square screens to carry around for output.

    2. IsJustabloke
      Meh

      Re: The real challenge for Huawei

      Innovation is not now and never has been a strength of the Chinese.

      They are however excellent at taking an existing product, making incremental tweaks to it and producing it at a prices considerably cheaper than the inspiration.

      Chinese companies play to these strengths superbly.

      1. Eddy Ito

        Re: The real challenge for Huawei

        Historically the Chinese actually did quite well in the innovation arena. Granted they didn't keep up with the control freaks of the world and they wound up subjugated by one imperial power or another and ultimately got stuck with their own control freak in Mao. They're only really starting to try to fix that but Xi is still a control freak and hasn't grasped the concept that you can't command innovation.

        1. fandom

          Re: The real challenge for Huawei

          If some Ming control freak had not stopped naval expeditions back in 1433 world history may have been very different.

          Although from his point of view it made some sense, after all they were so advanced compared to the rest of the world that everything worth having was already at China.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The real challenge for Huawei

            "Although from his point of view it made some sense, after all they were so advanced compared to the rest of the world that everything worth having was already at China."

            What I took away from Needham was that the actual Chinese problem was the failure to develop and exploit glass, which was a brake on chemistry, biology and physics. You can't make a microscope or a prism with porcelain, and the inability to make lenses means that many of your best minds are condemned to early retirement or administrative jobs.

            1. Dave 126 Silver badge

              Re: The real challenge for Huawei

              Yep, the lack of glass in the tea-drinking Middle Kingdom appears to have been an impediment in chemistry and optics. The wine drinking Europeans wanted transparent vessels.

              In many other areas of technology China has been way ahead over much of the last few thousand years.

    3. Eawebsitedesign

      Re: The real challenge for Huawei

      You make it sound like copying products, design and functionality are the exclusive domain of the Chinese companies. Apple didn't invent most of the initial iPhone functions, they put existing technologies into one product. Likewise, Samsung copied from Apple. There has always been this title for tat in the market. Personally, I think Huawei have achieved what they have tmdespite huge negative media from the USA and now here in the UK, and hope they continue to grow and innovate. Here's to their number 1 position in the near future and put Apple to bed. Crap phones and OS in my view from a company that created a 'we're superior than you' mentality from buyers of it's products with too much money but little brains.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The real challenge for Huawei

      Do people really want innovation and exciting change? I think most don't. Although the iPhone is regarded as a major game changer, the fact is that its initial sales were slow by current standards. In 2007 they sold about one and a half million, less than 1% of the numbers in recent years. And my feeling is that if they hadn't come up with the iPhone, somebody else would - just as Edison and Swan invented the incandescent bulb more or less at the same time. The technologies were converging on a solution to a number of technical problems.

      The laptop format has now persisted for 35 years (38 if you include the three years it took Grid to get it to market) of development. Innovation has been in the service of development. The only real innovation in road vehicles has, I think, been the tricycle scooters with tilting front suspension, and they haven't taken over the world.

      I think that for a product that has been around for only 11 years to be accused of refinement rather than innovation is a bit premature.

    5. ipaxa

      Re: The real challenge for Huawei

      Do you think Huawei is just a phone company?

      Huawei's main business is telecom, they are the worlds largest telecom equipment company, their R&D team develops and build 4G backbone networks, towers, switches, and undersea optical cables, they are the uncontested leader in 5G tech and own the critical polar code patents that make 5G work. Their chip division dont just make Kirin, they designs their own front end and baseband processor that goes into both network gear and phones.

      Compared to those, phones are just their side business, a side business thats only been around a around 5 years. The fact that their 5 year old side business now make better phones than Apple speaks more for their R&D power than any minor design feature.

      The fact that Apple spends almost as much as Huawei on "R&D", yet all they can come up with is trivial design features only fanboys will call innovation, really says alot about innovation in America in general.

  2. Waseem Alkurdi
    WTF?

    M-Pen?

    Of all possible names for a pen. they chose ... the M-Pen?

    Like, what the hell?

    If it was the 'Mate Pen", it would've been way less pointless.

    Or just keep it unnamed. The stylus. Bad idea?

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: M-Pen?

      You do wonder if Huawei need a new name in order to get good brand recognition? Few people in the West know how to pronounce it - and I've typed it 3 or 4 times in this thread, got it wrong every time and had to correct it.

      But then isn't that what the Mate brand is supposed to be for? It just doesn't seem to be that good.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: M-Pen?

        Howay man, they are clearly the Geordie phone company.

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: M-Pen?

      > Or just keep it unnamed. The stylus. Bad idea?

      Only because calling it a stylus doesn't differentiate from the dumb stylii that work with every capacitive-screened phone.

  3. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

    My Mum just got the Huawei P20 Lite for £220 ish. And it's a lovely phone. I was very impressed - being the first 'Droid I've used in a few years. It's a lot less of a UI mess than it used to be. You get serious bang for you buck in terms of 64GB of storage, a memory card reader, fingerprint sensor, decent processor and 4GB RAM. I think I've owned 2 of 3 PCs that were less powerful than this thing! But the reason she wanted it was the camera, which is nice - though I've not tested it properly. Double lens and does all sorts of clever that she'll never use.

    Huawei have put all their apps on the front page (and you can't delete them), and relegated all of Google's to a little folder. Also it took several hours to get set up right, but then half an hour of that was finding out she didn't know her Google password and re-setting it. And some of it was getting the right apps and setting up the homescreen for her. But there was at least an hour of dialling the Google and Huawei snooping down from 11 to something a little more reasonable.

    Generally I'm impressed.

    I'd love to see a Note clone from them. I don't want it to be super-premium though - so I'm hoping for a "lite" one. I want a stylus so I can knock out texts and emails longer than a paragraph without wanting to scream. A 5" (ish) screen is fine, and a sensible price. The original Note was only about £450 - how the hell have they got so expensive?

    1. Rainer

      Does else anybody find it ironic that British people refuse to have a population register (for their own government) but have no problem forking over much more data to what is basically a Chinese state-owned mega-corp?

      1. justAnITGuy

        We don't need no steenkin privacy

        Ironic? Maybe. We pretty much gave up the very notion of Privacy the day we all started carrying around Mobile Phones that location registration as the very foundation of how the tech operates. And without which there would be no Mobile Network as we accept it today.

        The addition of "Smartphones" and Apps that may track everything including our heartbeat but not, yet, our actual thoughts ... wait ... Social Media ... belay that!

        We are so far gone past Privacy that, really, a Population Register would appear to be the very least of our list of things that keep us awake nights.

        1. Aladdin Sane

          Re: We don't need no steenkin privacy

          Has the electoral register ceased to exist all of a sudden?

      2. 0laf
        Big Brother

        The Chinese state is probably more trustworthy with your personal information than Google, UK Gov, MS or many other firms. At leasthe Chinese intelligence services won't sell your data to advertisers ;-)

    2. imski

      I'm a big fan of the Px Lite series.

      I've had 2 (currently on P8 Lite) and got my mum a P10 Lite she loves.

      Great value for money, do what I need them to do...

      Tried to convince the mrs to get the P20 Lite, but she doesn't do sensible...

      Rather surprisingly to me she got the P20 instead (her first Huawei), the camera really won her over and despite it still being too much money, the damage was more contained than usual.

  4. big_D Silver badge

    Pricing

    The Mate 10 Pro was similarly priced this time last year, it dropped to between 500€ and 600€, but the release price was nearly as high as Samsung's S8+, so the X matching the Noite (now discounted) price at launch isn't a real surprise.

    Like most other devices, wait a couple of months for the prices to drop.

    I really like my Mate 10 Pro and the 20 Pro looks nice, but as the 10 Pro isn't a year old yet, I'll be giving hte 20 a miss.

    I also have the P20 as a company phone, which is also very nice, but has the notch and a big chin... :-S The Mate 10 looks better, to be honest.

    1. LochNessMonster

      Re: Pricing

      "I also have the P20 as a company phone, which is also very nice, but has the notch and a big chin... :-S"

      [I]Settings/Display/Notch....[/I] a single click and the notch is no more. Also available on the P20 Pro, P20 Lite and the above-mentioned Mate 20 Pro.

      You're welcome. ;-)

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Pricing

        The Notch is always there. Switching it "off" doesn't remove the camera and IR sensor etc. it just turns the top row of icons background to black.

        That doesn't change the fact that the top of the screen is close to the bezel and the bottom still has a huge chin, which isn't necessary, as they proved with the Mate, putting the fingerprint reader on the back...

  5. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

    Passive graphene CPU coolers please...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not possible

      All the graphene can do is spread the heat around more evenly, it can't make it go away. That's what a fan is for.

      Besides, while the coloration in their slide was adjusted to show large differences, we are only talking 4C in difference from the hottest to coolest areas (assuming green is 37-38C, yellow is 39-40C and red is 41-42C) so it isn't making that much difference. Do you think you'd really notice if one part of your phone was 4C hotter than another? If you did, would you care?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not possible

          I have a giant Zalman heatsink with a variable speed fan set at its lowest speed (I think it is something like 600 rpm) which along with a 120mm case fan in my mini-ITX at a similar minimum speed and fanless power supply does fine to keep my 65W Skylake basically silent. Oh, I can hear it if I get within a foot, but close enough. In the very rare cases when I might need it to spin up a few cores to crunch something the fans would get a bit louder, so I have headroom that a fanless set up does not.

          1. Dave 126 Silver badge

            Re: Not possible

            I try to keep my phone cool for the sake of the battery. My main concern is the case it sits in, which can't help heat dissipation. On a hot day with the GPS and maps running, I night splash it with water.

            Still, I reckon an official Samsung battery replacement when the time comes will be cheaper than an official screen replacement should I drop the naked phone.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I went to a Huawei launch and all I got was...

    ...a P9 phone. Bonkers. It was a couple of years ago now but every single one of the thousands of people in the packed venue was given a free phone on departure. Huawei had flown journos in from all over the world (including Mauritius!), put them up in a hotel and bussed them to the launch. The cost must have been absolutely staggering.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I went to a Huawei launch and all I got was...

      Clearly money well spent if you're still talking about it.

  7. noumanfiaz

    Mate 20 pro

    Very informative artical about mate 20 pro by huawei, everything explained.

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