Hands-on Huawei's new flagship Android phone, Ascend P7: 1.8GHz quad-core, 5-inch, 1080p
Huawei's Ascend P7 wants to be the LTE phone of the people — With the Ascend P6, Huawei looked to build a smartphone that emphasized design and material quality over performance.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Ascend G6 hands-on in February showed Huawei pushing 4G LTE and a strong front camera down into its mid-tier; the Ascend P7 now applies the same formula one rung higher, pairing a 1.8GHz quad-core chip and a 5-inch 1080p display with the design-and-materials emphasis Huawei established with the Ascend P6.
The pitch — 'the LTE phone of the people' — lands while Huawei sits as the world's third-biggest smartphone manufacturer off the back of 34 percent annual profit growth and a stated ambition to nearly double revenue again by 2018, and it drew same-day pickups from eight outlets including CNET, The Register and Re/code.
First-order effects
- Huawei gains a flagship that lets it compete for carrier LTE line-ups on design and price simultaneously rather than spec-for-spec against Samsung and Sony's flagships.
- Buyers in LTE markets get a full-HD, quad-core option positioned below the pricing of the incumbent premium Android tier.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the mid-premium Android segment — where margins are thinnest — face pressure to match LTE and display quality at Huawei's price points or cede volume.
- Carriers looking to populate LTE networks with affordable handsets gain a credible third supplier beyond the Korean incumbents, strengthening Huawei's negotiating position on shelf space and subsidies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Huawei's carrier-networking footprint becomes a distribution channel for its consumer devices, letting a Chinese vendor convert infrastructure relationships in emerging markets into smartphone share.
- Sustained flagship cadence would push the global top tier from a two-horse race toward a structure where Chinese OEMs contest the premium bracket on hardware value rather than discounting alone.
The trend: Chinese handset makers are climbing from budget volume into the premium Android tier by pairing flagship-class displays and LTE with aggressive pricing, using carrier relationships built in networking equipment as their wedge.