Riding coattails : hmmm... sounds familiar (TPL & dead Wood Goh)

[Dhalsim]

China’s Huawei rides Google coattails into new markets after pair team up on premium Nexus phablet

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 01 October, 2015, 2:07pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 01 October, 2015, 2:07pm

Agence France-Presse in Washington

A new Nexus 6P smartphone is on display on Tuesday. Google unveiled its newest Nexus smartphones with Huawei and LG as it looks to blunt the growth of Apple's iPhone. Photo: Bloomberg

With a partnership to make one of Google’s flagship Nexus smartphones, Chinese tech giant Huawei is gaining new prominence which could help its efforts to win broader global consumer appeal.

Huawei was tapped this week to produce the Nexus 6P, one of two handsets unveiled this week by Google to showcase its Android mobile operating system.

The large-screen “phablet” was unveiled as a rival to the iPhone 6S Plus and Samsung Galaxy Note. A second Google phone, the Nexus 5X, will be made by South Korea’s LG.

At a time when Chinese firms are struggling to break the dominance of Apple and Samsung on the high end of the smartphone market, the partnership is a milestone for Huawei.

David Burke, director of Android engineering for Google, holds a Nexus 6P during an event in San Francis. Photo: Bloomberg

“Clearly, working with Google is vote of confidence in the technology of the product,” said Ian Fogg, senior director at the consultancy IHS Technology.

Fogg said the Nexus devices “are intended to be showcases of the best of Android technology, and are designed to be seen as innovation leaders. That’s an incredibly valuable association to have.”

The deal with Google “opens up a route into the US market to raise visibility for Huawei smartphones,” Fogg noted.

“Huawei will be particularly pleased if this can be a bridgehead into the US market.”

Fogg said that this also helps Google, which is largely absent from China, should the US company decide to dive back into the large market.

Google product manager Andrew Bowers announces the new Android-based Pixel C tablet during a media event on September 29 in San Francisco. Photo: AFP

“In its home market of China, Huawei has both mobile operator relationships as well as its own expertise in selling smartphones direct to consumers,” Fogg said.

Huawei has been selling some unlocked high-end devices direct to US and European consumers, and has a share of the prepaid, low-end smartphone market along with Chinese rival ZTE.

But Huawei and other Chinese makers have generally lacked the appeal of Apple and Samsung for high-end smartphone customers.

The association with Google “provides a brand boost for Huawei,” noted Avi Greengart, who follows mobile technology at the research firm Current Analysis.

“If you are buying a Nexus phone and it has a Chinese brand prominently displayed, that’s definitely a positive.”

Greengart noted that consumers will be looking at more options now that many US carriers are “unbundling” the service from the device.

 

[Sagat]

And we have "big companies" like Huawei attempting to copy HTC phone


Huawei Honor 5X Images, Specs Spotted on Benchmark and Certification Sites

by Manish Singh , 29 September 2015

It seems Huawei has plans to launch many high-end smartphones this year. The Chinese technology conglomerate, which is expected to launch a Nexus smartphone called the Nexus 6P on Tuesday, is seemingly also ready to launch the Huawei Honor 5X.

The successor to last year's Honor 4X, the Honor 5X, recently stopped by the benchmarking website AnTuTu and Chinese certification website Tenaa, suggesting that its launch is not too far away.

As per the listing for the KIW-AL10 handset on Tenaa, purported to be the Honor 5X, the smartphone has a metal unibody design (compared with the polycarbonate body as seen in the Honor 4X). The listing also reveals that it will come with a fingerprint sensor.

As for the specifications, the Android 5.1.1-based handset is said to come with a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) display. It is said to be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 quad-core SoC paired with Adreno 405 GPU, 3GB of RAM. As for the storage, the Honor 5X as per the listing has 32GB of internal storage which can be expanded using a microSD card should you need more storage.

Other features of the handset include a 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. It will support 4G LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi and other standard connectivity options, as per the listing. On the software front, it is expected to run Android 5.1.1 Lollipop presumably with Emotion UI on top of it.

The AnTuTu post for the KIW-AL10 handset reveals that the handset will have 20916 score, which if accurate, is rather unimpressive. Other specs listed on the benchmark include Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC, 5.5-inch full-HD display, a 13-megapixel rear camera, and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, all of which corroborate the Tenaa listing.

If the hardware specifications of the Honor 5X are accurate, the handset will be mostly competing (whenever it launches in India) against Xiaomi's Mi 4i, and Lenovo K3 Note - both of which have much higher AnTuTu score.

We will know how accurate these details are as the handset is said to launch in October.