Huawei’s Comeback Story:
Okay, imagine there are two companies. Company A, which is already doing pretty good. It just worked with other companies. People love it. Every child dreams of buying their product. Every owner can’t stop talking about how good their product is. And then, there’s company B. Very innovative, but hit by a lot of restrictions. No company is allowed to work with this company. It has to make everything on its own, abandoned and destroyed. Now, if I ask, what company do you think did well after five years, what would be your answer? Most of you would say company A. Even I would say. The real answer is company B.
Here’s the shocking part. Company A is Apple, and company B is Google. Huawei sales in China grew by over 70%, while Apple’s declined by 18%. Huawei has been banned from selling in the USA. It’s banned in India. This is the list of countries Huawei is banned from. The list doesn’t stop. Even I couldn’t read the entire list.
You can imagine how hard it is to sell phones without Google services in it. I have to just survive. Just like somehow, this cell phone is what they are creating. Designs Apple wouldn’t even dare try. This is the latest Huawei Pura X. It’s a very fresh take on small compact phones, and it’s sold out in China.
So what’s so different about this phone? How come Huawei is still able to beat Apple, and moreover, how can India learn from them?
I’m pretty excited. This is a banger. Pratik, take wider. Let’s flipity – flapity-go. Now it comes in this big, fat, rose-gold color box, inside we get the phone, some paperwork, a transparent hard case, a Type-A to Type-C cable, and a 66W Q2 GaN charger.
Everything you need is inside the box. Now before we get to the exact reason why is Huawei winning, it’s important to understand this too. Like last time, we covered Huawei’s triple-fold Mate XT, first consumer triple-folding phone, and even this phone, in itself, is special.
Now, starting with the design, if you compare it with other flip phones in the market, the Pura X here looks quite beautiful and stunning, just like your crush. It comes in this glass finishing here with a speaker grille and camera island on the front.
Now the key factor here is, other flips, you’re supposed to be using 90% of the time unfolded, like a normal phone, and 10% of the time you can do stuff on the outdoor cover screen, whereas on the Pura X, you’re supposed to use this phone folded 90% of the time. For that, you get this 3.5-inch display, you can open apps like Maps, File Manager, Camera, etc.
Even the buttons and everything are optimized to use when folded. Like the volume button is placed on the top part of the screen, whereas the power button is on the right side where your thumb naturally rests.
In fact, there is a speaker on the phone here, so you can even pick up calls on the flip phone folded. You cannot do this on any other flip. And so far, I’m liking this form factor because it’s very convenient and logical to use a flip phone this way.
Also, if I put a paper in between the displays and completely shut the phone, the hinge is so tight and strong, like I can literally hold the phone with this paper. Does it fall? Does it fall? Does it fall? And 10% of the time, you’re supposed to open the flip and use it as it is established. And that’s it.
Thank you. Thank you. I have said all of this, there is a little problem here.
Only a specified set of apps work on this cover display, so eventually you will have to unfold the phone. And 10% of the time, you are supposed to open the flip and use it as a big tablet. You get the 6.3-inch 16×10 panel display, in the first 5-10 minutes, it feels a bit weird to open the phone like this and then turn it to the right. It’s a struggle, but the more you do it, you get used to it.
This is a 12-core, 7nm-based Kirin 9020. Now, some of you might not have heard of the processor because it is made by Huawei. Usually, processors are made by Qualcomm or MediaTek. They have cores designed by us.
But the Kirin processors come with their own cores called iShark, I think. So, in our sad attempt to run all the benchmarking apps, we were only successful to run 3DMark and CPU Throttling. So, the benchmark that you see, it performs close to a Snapdragon 8th Gen 3 processor and in very simple words, this performs like a 2022 flagship.
Now, we also tried installing heavy games like COD Warzone, Wuthering Waves, but it wasn’t getting installed with our tricks. And out of all the games we tried to install, we were only able to run BGMI, which runs maximum at 60 FPS with smooth graphics. So much money to play BGMI. Now, I enjoyed playing BGMI at 60 FPS on the inner display.
Like, the screen is big, fourth finger is pretty easy. So, overall, the performance here is the area where they are trying to up their game, but they are still lacking quite a lot from the current flagships.
So, this was the Huawei Pura X. Now, coming back to the question, how is Huawei beating Apple? First of all, not just Huawei, but again, all Chinese brands are definitely innovating in terms of different form factors like this Huawei Pura X.
In fact, this entire year, we have been talking about how good smartphone camera is from Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, all Chinese companies. And partly, they use better hardware and second is the collaboration with camera brands.
You think innovation and better value clones are the only reason for the success of Huawei? It can’t be just that. Well, yes, the other reason is Chinese government. After all those bans and sanctions, Huawei was still able to beat widely popular Apple in China.
If you see the top selling smartphone brands in China from 2023 to 2024, Huawei has surpassed Apple in China with a 50% growth. So in very simple words, in 2024, the local government in some places in China started offering discounts of 10-20% on their locally made smartphones, like Huawei.
And there was a big jump in the sales figure. And that is where Huawei kicked off, leaving Apple behind. And year on year, the government helped Huawei to manufacture, innovate a processor and software.
So China went from just manufacturing smartphones for other companies to making their own smartphone company. Now in India, we do have a PLI scheme for smartphone brands, but we need more innovation in design and manufacturing.
We want it in-house. Like we are one of the largest smartphone consumers in the world. We need a local Indian smartphone company. And not those that disappear in one year. Not those. So let us know what I have thought on this one. On that note, this is me signing off.
