back to article GPU fairy visits Huawei owners, leaves graphics boost under phones

Older readers may recall an era where large computer firms shipped their systems with next year's upgrades already in place. In exchange for a large sum of money, a service technician would come round, open the box, and flick a switch. Huawei has become the second phone maker after Google to offer the same sort of thing – but …

  1. tip pc Silver badge

    Sounds like they shipped an unfinished product but charged for the finished item.

    Was the phone feature complete at sale or half finished?

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      It was complete as far as those that purchased it understood it to be at the time. The article is quite clear that this enhancement was poorly documented let alone marketed. It's a step way too far to complain about a totally free unexpected enhancement to a piece of hardware you purchased some time ago.

      People these days really do spend their time looking for things to be annoyed about.

    2. Tom 7

      Re Unfinished product

      Might not be them - ARM has been releasing software for its chips under the Compute Library and ARMNN and other stuff.

      I'm even more pissed off at having my ARM shares stolen from me now!

  2. PNGuinn
    Black Helicopters

    So, the Real Question is:

    What additional data is the phone going to secretly going to slurp, and who is it going to be sent to (at the phoner's expense, of course)?

    Answers on a postcard, please, to ....

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: So, the Real Question is:

      What additional data is the phone going to secretly going to slurp, and who is it going to be sent to (at the phoner's expense, of course)?

      That's why we're begging for an open-source-hardware phone. And that's why companies are turning a deaf ear to that.

  3. Fursty Ferret

    Unless you bought a UK P20 Pro, which is now more than 22 point releases behind the rest of the world in terms of software updates.

    Completely ignored by Huawei since release and will definitely be my last Huawei phone.

    The positive reviews on the Internet were universally written by people who received a free one.

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Finally! Another human being (aside from myself) who thinks Huawei isn't worth a drip of the hype it's given online!

      I really wonder how they got XDA-Developers.com pimped to them.

  4. Andy Livingstone

    Better aim

    They should try to supply UK charging plugs here.

    1. Waseem Alkurdi
      Flame

      Re: Better aim

      Nooooooo! That's detrimental for China's economy!

      The solution is to supply the wrong plug, then sell you a $1 adapter (that has to be made in China, but not necessarily by Huawei).

      Boom! That's NN thousand (NN thousand $CURRENCY) plugs for every second phone sold! (Assuming the other half have their own adapters)

  5. krs360

    Huawei? Pushing an update? So my p20 pro will see it in about a year then.

  6. Bavaria Blu
    Go

    post-purchase rationalization

    I love my Huawei. Great quality, nice and fast and great value. The best purchase I have made in years.

  7. juice

    So...

    A company shipped hardware with features turned off, pending on the rollout of software which could use said hardware?

    I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. After all, we've never heard of that happening in the industry before!

    No, wait, we have. Sometimes (e.g. Intel CPU microcode updates), they even turn existing features off; other times, they never get around to turning the feature on.

    Case in point: my ancient Nokia N800 table. Fitted with a 400mhz CPU and a PowerVR GPU. Originally, the CPU was clocked at at 330mhz (allegedly due to some DSP issue, though information is thin on the ground); this was then bumped up to 400mhz in a later OS release.

    Sadly, official drivers for the PowerVR GPU were never released - I've never dug into the details, but there was a half-hearted attempt by the community to produce some drivers which never made it out of alpha. As such, the N800 presumably just fell back to using the GPU as a basic framebuffer, leaving it to the CPU and DSPs to handle video codecs and UI composition.

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