Huawei silent on Mate 70 chip at smartphone launch, focuses on Android rival HarmonyOS

Huawei Technologies kept a lid on what, if any, chip advancements sit inside its Mate 70 series smartphones during a launch event on Tuesday, as the tech giant looks to take a bigger bite out of Apple’s market share in China.

Richard Yu Chengdong, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, took the stage in Shenzhen to unveil the Mate 70 and three more premium handsets in the same line, with a starting price of 5,499 yuan (US$760). He called the new series “the most powerful Mate phones in history”, without mentioning any details about the processor that powers them.

Instead, Yu highlighted the HarmonyOS Next operating system, which the company says offers 40 per cent better performance on the latest smartphones over the Mate 60 series. HarmonyOS Next is Huawei’s home-grown mobile operating system that has diverged from Android to the point of no longer being compatible with those apps.

Huawei also touted its latest artificial intelligence (AI) features, such as photo enhancement and hand gestures, which include the ability to grab and release images for sharing to different devices.

The release of the Mate 70 has been closely watched by the industry looking for any indication that it would be able to advance beyond the China-made processor in last year’s Mate 60 devices. That chip was said to have been produced by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) using a 7-nanometre process. US sanctions on Huawei and SMIC have sought to restrict access to such technology.