Huawei Mate 70 debuts: AI features take aim at Apple's dominance in China

Huawei's Mate 70 is powered by the Chinese HarmonyOS Next and will have features like improved photography, live transcription and translation of phone calls

Chinese smartphone giant Huawei unveiled the Mate 70 series last week with artificial intelligence (AI) features designed to take on Apple, which is yet to release AI features in China.

An Apple Inc. store across from a Huawei Technologies Co. flagship store in Shanghai, China, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024 (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

The Chinese HarmonyOS Next powers the new device and will have features such as improved photography, live transcription and translation of phone calls.

Over three million people had also signed up on Huawei’s website to reserve it.

This comes after the previous release of the Mate 60 Pro catapulted Huawei to the top of China's smartphone market, all because it had a tiny computer chip more advanced than any previously made by a Chinese company.

Huawei's market share more than doubled, reaching half of the Chinese market this year while in 2022, three-quarters of the high-end smartphones sold in China were iPhones.

This also underlines the struggle between China and the US for dominance over advanced chip technology, with policymakers in Washington having spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from being able to make the kind of chip Huawei uses in its Mate phone.

The developments come after the 2021 return of Meng Wanzhou, a top Huawei executive, who became somewhat of a hero in China despite spending almost three years of detention in Canada while facing fraud charges in the US.

The first Trump administration had also put a series of trade restrictions against Huawei in 2022.

The Mate 70's success could depend on Huawei’s ability to get a steady supply of chips. For the Mate 60, it relied on Chinese chip maker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), which is partly state owned and is the only maker of advanced chips in China.

SMIC however, has struggled to make enough chips for Huawei. But Huawei has to rely on SMIC since foreign chip makers like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has stopped sending chips to Chinese clients.

“Not only Huawei but now all China-based AI makers, they face the same issue,” the report quoted Linda Sui, a senior director at TechInsights, a market research firm as saying. “If they all ship through SMIC, that’s going to make the supply constraints even worse next year.”