Smartphone innovation, the Huawei way

Li commented on two pictures taken with Huawei's Leica Dual Camera. He noted that the picture on the left has a bokeh effect, providing depth, and said he had chosen the picture because of the different shades of green in it. "People's eyes are very sensitive to green and to different shades of green," he said. "Dark or bright green, the gradient is very smooth." The picture of the right, showing an ear of corn and reflections of clouds, is an example of vivid colours and sharp contrasts.

Huawei has taken a different path with smartphone innovation compared to rivals Apple and Samsung. "We clearly understand that we cannot win the future and the minds of our consumers by playing the same way that the competition has played," David Kim, Brand Director, Consumer Business Group, Huawei said.

At Huawei, handset development begins with understanding the smartphone user, shared Li Changzhu, VP, Handset Business for the Huawei Consumer Business Group. Li oversees the company's strategy and business development for handsets.

In a briefing for media Li said the six major behaviours that Huawei has observed include:

- Smartphone users typically spend long hours online, with Huawei forecasting that average daily use will double in two years. "Your battery must be durable must support you for the whole day," said Li.

- Mobile video on demand is an up-and-coming killer app. There are currently 800 million video app users. 

- Photography and sharing pictures are popular activities. Six in 10 smartphone users love taking pictures, resulting in image management issues. "How do you share, how do you help to manage the tons of photos (taken); to search, to store, to secure the photos? And how to share the pictures on the phone (with) the PC?" Li asked.

- Mobile payments is extremely popular in emerging markets, with 47% of smartphone users making use of this capability. In contrast, adoption rates are 20% in developed countries.

- Gaming is another mobile favourite. The global gamer population has exploded from 100 million in 1995 to 2.7 billion today, Huawei said.

-  Eighty-eight percent of smartphone users use one or more digital healthcare tools. "Everyone cares about their own health, about their own physical and their mental condition as well," Li said. "With solutions from third parties we hope to provide comprehensive services for health."

These behaviours have led to three major painpoints for smartphone use: slowing performance when the average smartphone user utilises nine apps a day; selfies dominating phone usage, accounting for a full third of all photos taken; and bad battery life, informing what Huawei works to improve in future handsets. Today Huawei's phones can achieve as much as two days of uninterrupted performance on a 30-minute charge, the company said.

Huawei has an advantage with its own chipsets - its latest chipset, the Kirin 970 with integrated artificial intelligence (AI), was recently launched and promises improvements in photography and overall performance. "If you get the chipset from someone else you cannot innovate. You cannot optimise the best functions of your phone with it," Kim explained.

Huawei's smartphone product philosophy revolves around providing premium quality, enhancing the user experience, and innovation, Li summarised. "Premium products are the core of all our efforts and investments," he said. "The technology must create value for the user."

An example of how this strategy has played out is with the smartphone camera. Huawei understands that photography is used to express emotion and tell stories, and decided to cooperate with Leica three years ago to develop a better smartphone camera in recognition of Leica's leadership in optical design.

"(We thought,) why not transfer this technology to smartphones to test the best optics with the best technology?" Li recalled. The result was Huawei's first Leica dual lens camera in the P9 smartphone in April 2016, comprising a 12 megapixel RGB sensor and a 12 megapixel monochrome sensor. The world's first Leica dual camera used a Leica Summarit lens. This was followed by a second-generation Leica dual camera in the Mate 9 smartphone in November 2016 with a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor, a 12 megapixel RGB sensor and 2x hybrid zoom. A third-generation Leica dual camera in the P10 and P10 Plus, featuring a f1.8 Summilux lens, launched February 2017, can take "Leica-style" portraits.

Li described the colour gradients that a Leica smartphone camera can achieve as "smooth as silk", and said that the partnership with Leica transformed Huawei's manufacturing approach. He recalled that a 130-grid test to test the accuracy of the colour gamut, for which Huawei's criteria for success had been the ability to recover (reproduce) 60 to 70 of the grid squares in the centre of the test image.

"Leica wanted to recover 120 blocks - almost the whole picture, especially the edge parts," he shared.

Another difference in expectations about quality standards came when testing flares and ghosting, which can occur in images due to strong light interacting with the camera lens. Huawei's test lighting had been light from a normal flashlight. Leica, on the other hand, used the more powerful light bulb from a projector. "It was a total disruption for our technical guys," Li said. "Even against the sun (pictures taken with the Leica smartphone camera) have almost no flares or ghosting."

Huawei also invested in post-processing technologies that give users the ability to create more interesting pictures. Long exposures typically absorb a lot of light, turning the brighter parts of an image white in a phenomenon called overexposure. The later Huawei smartphones offer four modes for long exposures, including a mode just for taking pictures of flowing water, Li said, and have intelligent algorithms that retain normal lighting for parts of the image which would have otherwise been overexposed.

"I give you a tool kit to exert your imagination and creativity," he said.

The company has also provided a 4.5G experience through building in double the antennas, which has doubled the network speed. "The most important and most difficult part (of maintaining) the performance of the antenna is with the metal cover. The unibody design has a masking effect," Li said.

Safety comes first for batteries, Li added. "The most critical thing for the battery is safety. Otherwise it is like a bomb," he said.

Huawei has fit relatively large batteries in an ultra slim body. Its P10 Plus smartphone has a 3,750 mAh battery in a 7mm case against a Samsung S8 Plus which has a 3,500 mAh battery in an 8.1mm case. But as it becomes more challenging to fit a larger battery into a smaller case Huawei has thought laterally to squeeze more battery performance. "One of our efforts is to rewrite the Android kernel. With EMUI version 5 and beyond we have enhanced efficiency and internal resources," he said. Huawei's Emotion UI (EMUI) is its Android smartphone operating system.

At the same time, Huawei has invested in fast charging technologies. Huawei SuperCharge is the company's version of fast charging, designed to reduce phone downtime to the minimum, and is supported by accessories such as car chargers, and power banks.

"We will keep on improving," Li said, listing component, design and management, testing and culture as different aspects of the quality focus.

Huawei is also extending beyond feature sets in its quest to grow awareness of its smartphone brands. Another smartphone co-innovation partner is the Pantone Colour Institute. Huawei came up with P10 Greenery in the exact shade of Pantone's colour of the year 2017 - called greenery - for consumers who use their smartphones as a lifestyle statement. "It's not just a gadget, it's a fashion accessory as well. For younger users it's about expression," Kim said.

The company also launched the first annual NEXT-IMAGE Awards with the International Center of Photography (ICP) last month.

Source: Huawei. Picture illustrating the Check-In category for the NEXT-IMAGE Awards.

"Huawei's innovation in domains like artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR), holographic imaging, and optics are given new forms of physical expression in our smartphones," Li said at the signing ceremony. "These technologies also give rise to endless new possibilities in visual expression, making the creative process more enjoyable than ever before." 

The NEXT-IMAGE plan is the culmination of Huawei’s efforts to redefine visual expression and culture with more professional and intuitive smartphone cameras. With the right technology and a unique style, Huawei wants to explore the next-generation of visual expression together with smartphone users around the globe. Together with ICP, Huawei will hold a series of cross-media activities, including competitions, exhibitions and collections, and educational opportunities designed to enrich visual expression based on three core elements: technology, style, and culture. 

From 2017, the awards will provide smartphone users from around the world with a gallery where they can showcase their best work. “The International Center of Photography is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. I am thrilled that the NEXT-IMAGE awards and future projects with Huawei will scale up ICP’s reach and impact, and allow both ICP and Huawei to find new ways to activate smartphone technology to increase visual literacy globally and across generations. The synergy between ICP and Huawei will inspire and increase our connections to each other through presenting new ways of learning and innovative ways for creating and sharing visual content,” said ICP Executive Director Mark Lubell when the awards were announced in early September. 

The "NEXT" in NEXT-IMAGE refers to the next generation of photographers using the next generation of tools to create and spread the next generation of visual content – all with new forms of interaction and feedback. The "IMAGE" part of the name refers to both static images and new forms of dynamic visual expression. 

There are seven categories for the 2017 awards: 

• @All 

• Me, Myself & I 

• Hello, Life! 

• Check-In 

• Citizen Witness 

• 3x3 

• Timeline 

The Plan will also include an act of collective creation initiated by ICP to be activated during the awards and for the months immediately following aimed to encourage and sustain participation from imagemakers who are utilising smartphone technology. All in all, the competition takes a fresh approach to traditional contest elements like category design, submission, and judging. 

According to the IDC Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker 111.8 million smartphones were shipped to China in Q217. Apart from Huawei’s P10 which boosted shipment growth, Honor-branded phones continued to remain popular and made up more than half of Huawei’s overall shipments, IDC said.

Interested?

Find out more about the NEXT IMAGE Awards. The call for entries officially began on September 9, 2017, and winners will be announced on December 19.

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about how Huawei maintains smartphone quality

Hashtag: #华为OPENDAY

Note: This report stems from a Huawei-hosted visit to China. The company sponsored accommodation and travel costs.