The new Huawei goes upmarket, but the old Huawei still threatens • The Register

If all this sounds familiar to you, you'd be right

The envy of the bezel … Huawei takes a look at Apple's Notch

Analysis For a company that scarcely four years ago had vowed not to "engage in significant advertising campaigns," Huawei now offers extensive demonstrations of wealth and technological prowess. The extravagance of yesterday has attracted more than 5,000 people in the Excel Center of London to see four new phones and two wearable devices, ranging from 99 to 2,099 euros.

Each event is a festival of Chinese engineering that does not require any expense and whose scale is greater than any rival. The first graphene cooling in the world? Got that. Charge of 40W? That's us. Reverse wireless charging? Of course. Add a new memory card size, the size of a nano SIM, for good measure.

Huawei surpassed Apple's research and development spending two years ago and with more than 80,000 STEM graduates under its wing, it's an engineering-centric approach.

The Mate 20 Pro is certainly the most technically developed Android on the market, at a price. Richard Yu, from Huawei, could boast of the world's first use of graphene as a cooling material in a consumer device, for example. It's in the Mate 20 X the size of a phablet – something that Huawei has managed to keep away from leaks.

But the questions remain. Can Huawei humanize and popularize its technologies, just like Apple? It is not enough to put something in a gadget, you have to make people love it enough to use it. And can Huawei create brand new product categories rather than taking an idea and doing it better and / or cheaply? On both points, the jury is out.

Titles will focus on new technologies and higher prices – a move upmarket. But there is still a bit of the old Huawei, a fast copier that adds something of its own.

One is the Mate 20 X. The 7.2-inch phone, 5000 mAh is a bit of old Huawei to go with the new. He has already made giant phones because the home market loves big phones. But this one is an impeccable copy of the series of notes of Samsung, with assertions of game performances (there is a joystick to clip) and an "M-Pen". The phone has no room for its stylus, unlike the note.

But the X will be sold € 899 (6GB / 128GB from October 28), which allows to park the tanks at the door of Samsung (note 9 is officially £ 899 without SIM card here). Both become a PC with a bit of magic similar to Continuum, although that of Samsung is more mature. Both eliminate the need for a PC or tablet a lot of the time.

Aside from cooling with graphene, there is not much new in this possible computer replacement, but it is not mandatory. The lifting of heavy loads has already been done by other divisions – excellent imaging, for example.

I found that the Watch GT was another example of "Old Huawei". This is a monster timepiece, which makes the 44mm appearance of the Apple Watch low in comparison. This is not (yet) an open platform, and it's a direct copy of Google's WearOS, until the list of useless rotating applications. But it has a careful monitoring of activity and health that encourages people to choose a wearable device. Apart from the Apple brand, nothing makes the smartwatch of the ray pass. The Apple Watch can only take occasional samples of your heart rate, Yu pointed out. Huawei does it all the time. Much of the benefits comes from Google's dumping and the use of its own LiteOS. The gains outweigh the questionable benefits of Google 's portable application ecosystem, and it' s been a neglected application store for a long time.

The price is even more intriguing. At € 199 (Sport), € 249 (Classic) and € 99 (Band 3 Pro), the Garmin and Fitbit watches are comfortably dumped, being discounted at around £ 249 to £ 300.

I've already reported the threat that Huawei's "best but cheaper" electronic products potentially represent for established players here – but so far the product has not been sold at all. Europe, or only afterwards. We'll see if that changes with the X and Watch GT. ®