Huawei’s high-end series P10, featuring a dual-lens camera from Leica, is more than a smartphone for portraits, it’s at the cutting edge of smartphone innovation – that was our impression of the P10 after visiting its production line in Dongguan and test lab in Shenzhen.
The third largest smartphone brand worldwide, Huawei opened its technological production center and test labs to the public for the first time on its “Huawei Smartphone Open Day” held on May 16th, where the Shenzhen-based company showcased its products and technological achievements in the mobile industry.
Huawei opened its production line, as well as its test labs, filled with facilities that are among the most advanced production lines in APAC and even globally, powered by its large R&D investments each year. In 2016, Huawei invested over 11 billion US dollars in R&D, accounting for more than 15% of revenue, according to the 2016 Huawei Annual Report.
During the Open Day, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group (CBG), together with He Gang, President of Huawei Smartphone Product Line, and other product managers, facilitated technical salons on Huawei P10 smartphone design, research initiatives, and future development roadmap.
“We are determined to change and become more open and transparent, and to improve at listening and communication in order to minimize misunderstanding. More importantly, we will take note of your valuable suggestions and incorporate them into the company’s development roadmap, to make Huawei become better and better,” CEO Richard Yu said at the opening of the event.
Here are some of the highlights:
1. P10’s power consumption is lower than their peer competitors.
P10’s power can communicate with the charger, and convert 220V and match it to mobile phone. Normally, each conversion will reduce the efficiency, however, in the same condition, the power loss of P10 will be about 10%. Also, there will be no heat generated from your phone.
2. Super charge can maintain a low temperature while charging P10.
Sometimes the phone can suffer from the thermo problem because of the power charger. However, if the P10 is getting too hot while charging, it will automatically disconnect itself.
3. Users can travel the world with Huawei phone, without having to convert to 3G or 2G.
Usually when a user travels overseas, the phone wouldn’t match the frequency of the other country, so users might have to stick to 3G or 2G. Huawei tries to make P10 compact at the same time keeping the antenna, so that users can keep on using 4G.
4. Huawei phones can grab the red packet faster.
In China, it’s a big deal which brand and model of smartphone you own, because certain phones may lead you to higher chance of grabbing red packets sent through WeChat groups. Starting 2 years ago, Huawei has worked on improving the speed of grabbing the red packet bringing the highest efficiency on the speed of the modem and the backend.
5. Huawei was first in the world to use the dual camera
“Since 2011, we have been working on addressing how to take better pictures and give better lighting effect internally. There were not many materials to make it possible at that time. We had to work on the sensor, and came up with our own chip set solution in 2013. At the end of 2014, we had our prototype,” Bruce Lee, VP of Huawei Consumer Business Group told TechNode.
In 2015, Huawei introduced their dual camera phone, P9. “We chose two colors on the P9 camera, so that the diffusion will be reduced, improve the color, and recognize sensitive lights.”
6. Huawei puts great importance on design
Huawei has global design teams across Xi’an, Shanghai, Beijing, Japan, Korea, London and Paris to find out the trend and do research and a UX studio in San Francisco, full of 200 designers with BFA, MFA design degrees, and engineering degrees. A separated team called the IDC team is dedicated to preparing for the future.
“When we design, we want to apply what consumers look for to our phones. We conduct market surveys, competitor analysis, and focus group interviews on a regular basis to find that out,”Joonsuh Kim, the Chief Design Officer at Huawei told TechNode. “Huawei’s design philosophy is: when we design the product, every design should have reason behind, and the reason should be for the innovation. In other words, design is all about ‘feeling’, and users should be able to feel our design.”
7. Huawei’s production line and test lab are really cool
The Product Experience Testing Lab, which uses the 4th generation of Huawei’s self-developed Automatic Testing System, was one of the highlights of this event. Based on various application scenarios, this multi-million dollar system is designed to test all kinds of problems users may encounter in actual use and provide detailed optimization solutions.
For example, bionic robots can simulate human actions, including clicking, dragging and swiping. The lab can also accurately log the lagging phenomenon in any software to the exact second and detect failure, which is difficult for the human eye to observe. All tests conducted in the Product Experience Testing Lab are based on common scenarios of users’ daily lives.