Huawei unveils the $760+ Mate 70 series, powered by its HarmonyOS Next, calling the flagship the “smartest” Mate phone, as it continues to face US chip curbs
Last year, a chip breakthrough put Huawei on top of the Chinese smartphone market. Now it is rolling out its newest phone, the Mate 70 series.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The Mate 70 follows Huawei’s April Pura 70 launch, whose higher-end models were reported to use the Kirin 9010, extending the company’s effort to keep refreshing premium handsets under semiconductor restrictions.
Its timing is notable because reports had said Huawei and SMIC were having difficulty producing chips for this flagship under US restrictions. The launch also brings the platform strategy Huawei outlined years earlier—HarmonyOS across phones, tablets, wearables and foldables—to a new flagship generation.
First-order effects
Huawei gains a new premium handset line starting above $760 and makes HarmonyOS Next the software foundation for its latest Mate devices.
Huawei’s handset suppliers and retail channels must support a new flagship rollout while managing any component constraints that could affect availability.
If Huawei can repeatedly ship competitive flagships with its own silicon and operating system, its smartphone business becomes less dependent on technology controlled by overseas platform and chip suppliers.
The larger constraint remains execution: sustained device volumes, developer support and chip production—not a single launch—will determine whether this becomes a durable alternative mobile stack.
The trend: Huawei is pairing domestically controlled hardware with a proprietary operating system to reduce external technology dependencies in premium smartphones.
It turned out Huawei had secretly been pouring tons of R&D for years into designing domestic chips. The chip's performance showed that Huawei and SMIC had overcome the technical limitations previously thought insurmountable with older DUV tech. The only remaining thread tying
Huawei is hosting their Mate brand event at the moment they just unveiled their new huawei mate 70 series The mate 70 features 5700mAh battery, 100W fast charging and upto 80W wireless charging HarmonyOS NEXT is claimed to offer 40% increased efficiency when compared to mate 60 […
I'm headed to Huawei's Mate 70 launch event in Shenzhen (yes, Shenzhen Metro has business class). This phone/chip/OS/event is a really big deal for Chinese tech, and has big implications for US-China relations. Here's some background. [image]
China is claiming a fully US-independent phone. The Huawei Mate 70 has a 5G chip and now runs non-Android software. The chip was supposed to be impossible due to Western limits on ASML. But apparently, DC's sanctions incentivized China to build their own. [image]
@Huawei ... Lots of really innovative features, including by far the most advanced gesture controls, thanks to the powerful cameras and sensors under the screen. The screen is the most advanced on a phone, which is why they had to move the fingerprint sensor to the side. [video]
@Huawei ... Huawei is just running away with this, releasing things no other tech company could in a single event. - $3,300 USD smart watch with real gold - $2,000 foldable phones - $700 tablet - $400 health watch [image]