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BARCELONA, Spain – China's Huawei Technologies on Sunday pledged to dominate the next generation of mobile technologies with the launch of its long-awaited new foldable smartphone, claiming to have the world's thinnest and most flexible mobile phone while retaining the next generation 5G capabilities.
The launch on the eve of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the largest annual event in the industry, comes just days after Samsung Electronics launched its flexible smartphone Galaxy Fold in San Francisco on Wednesday.
The two companies are fighting for the biggest development in smartphone design since Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. The industry hopes that the flexible phones, which come in small tablets, will help to revive the enthusiasm of consumers face lower sales.
The phone of the Chinese company is designed to showcase its technological prowess. The Huawei Mate X folds to the rear, the screen being outside. When it's closed, the handset splits into two screens: a 6.6-inch screen representing a fully functional smartphone main screen and a 6.38-inch screen on the other side. Once unfolded, it becomes an 8-inch tablet thinner than the new iPad Pro.
Unlike Samsung's Galaxy Fold, the closed Mate X is completely flat, thanks to a special hinge system, and is only 11mm thick. According to Huawei, this model is 35% thinner than Samsung's design, which folds like a book and has an extra screen on the outside.
Huawei has announced that its Mate X will cost 2,299 euros and will be available from June this year. The collapsible smartphone of the Chinese company is more expensive than that of its South Korean rival, which sells for $ 1,980.
The Chinese company said the foldable handset would also be equipped with its own 5G modem chip, Balong 5000. The data transfer would be twice as fast as the current standard reference, the Qualcomm X50, used by Oppo and Xiaomi to build the 5G. smartphones this year.
"A 1 gigabit movie can be downloaded in 3 seconds [with our 5G chipset]"Said Peter Gauden, global general manager of product marketing at Huawei. "We are building the 5G chipset, we are building the 5G handset, we are also building the 5G networks … We have the option to test a 5G handset in a 5G network internally, which gives us an edge."
The next generation of 5G capabilities should enable faster data transmission and reduced latency, features that will be essential for advanced technologies such as autonomous driving, artificial computing and remote surgery.
Samsung and Huawei are competing for leadership in the global smartphone market, which saw its largest decline in 2018, the recession expected to continue this year. Samsung lost market share to a rapidly growing Huawei, which ranks third in the industry, just behind Apple.
Samsung and Apple – the world's two largest smartphone brands – saw their shipments plummet by 8% and 3.2% respectively last year, according to data from IDC.
In contrast, Huawei saw its market share grow by over 33% despite the highly publicized dispute with the United States over its telecom equipment business. Washington has accused the Chinese company of theft of intellectual property and espionage, which Huawei denies.
Huawei's Mate X uses a flexible OLED display from its partner, BOE Technology Group, the leading screen producer in China, while Samsung used its OLED screen manufactured in-house.
Samsung has adopted the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset – that Xiaomi's latest flagship phone, the Mi9 – was also used – as the central processor for Galaxy Fold, while Huawei used the internal design Kirin 980 chipset. The Samsung and Huawei folding phones feature a dual battery system and support multitasking on Android operating systems.
"I think Huawei's design exceeds my expectations (…), it looks more beautiful than Samsung's offer," said Sam Pullen, a commentator of technologies and gadgets at Nikkei Asian Review. "But my concern is [technically] how Huawei's Mate X wants to be so flat. "
Boyce Fan, an analyst at WitsView, said that a screen that can fold inward – like Samsung's design – is technically harder to manufacture than those folding to the outside.
"At the same time, if the screen is folded outward, like the Huawei phone, the question of how to protect it from damage is another problem," Fan said. The analyst added that the durability of the display was also crucial for such foldable handsets when it came to real user experiences. Samsung was more experienced in mass production of such advanced displays, he said.
However, most market observers agreed that the revolutionary folding design was still in its infancy and that shipments would be limited in 2019. "In the case of Samsung, it would be significantly less than 1 million units and for Huawei, its availability will be further reduced given its access to quality OLED displays … The foldable phone is still an experimental product that seeks to attract the attention of the international community to the forefront ", said Roger Sheng, analyst at Gartner.
Other manufacturers are expected to unveil their flexible phones at this week's MWC. The Chinese startup Royole has already beaten Samsung and Huawei with a foldable, launching its FlexPai last October. Xiaomi also confirmed working on a foldable smartphone, publishing a video excerpt in January of a technical sample foldable into three, thus turning it into a compact phone.
The writer Nikkei Lauly Li in Taipei contributed to the report
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