Huawei exec: 'Word of mouth' will beat Apple and Samsung in Europe Huawei insists its won’t splash the cash to compete with Samsung and Apple in Europe’s overcrowded consumer market. Late last year, Huawei became the world’s No 3 phone maker* from a standing start: it only began selling branded phones three years ago. Although Huawei itself is now gigantic with 150,000 employees – and a mind- …
Is that really true?
If Huawei are as long term as they seem to be signalling, they wouldn't want to have a potential Snowden moment on the agenda. Perhaps all the attacks on Huawei are because, like BlackBerry, they are a bit of a threat to the "intelligence community"?
The preferred Chinese method of industrial espionage seems simply to be to place lots of Chinese graduates in US companies, and rely on good old USB sticks, keyloggers and photocopiers. While the US is obliging enough not to train enough graduates of its own in STEM subjects, preferring to import them, this is likely to remain the easiest and most reliable approach.
Huawei seems to be a company that doesn't go in for celebrity CEOs - in fact is obviously trying to avoid the whole Stalin/Mao model which is strangely so popular in the US - and which tries to prevent its divisions from getting overexcited by short term success.
I wonder how much success it would take from them before shareholders in more personality cult based comanpies start to wonder if it is indeed true that there is no alternative?
Huawei need to buck their ideas up regarding OS updates if they really want to make an impact. the current Flagship P6 is still on 4.2. Although Chinese users have had an upgrade to 4.4 recently. the previous top line phone the P2 hasn't seen any updates and is still on 4.1. It's just another Landfill handset maker with pretentions.
Consumers need wooing by advertising. It's almost part of the definition. Samsung didn't the sales by word of mouth but by years of sponsoring and more recently advertising. Can't be long before we see some sports team or competition emblazoned with Huawei's logo.
…Windows Phone’s rapid rise (in Europe) perhaps supports that case…
Sales-based numbers please. Kantar is still boosting Windows phone at 7.5 %, comScore however puts it at less than 5% and from what I've seen I think even that's a bit high.
A lot will depend on how it feels in both the tactile and usage sense. I had an HTC Desire S for a bit over 2 years, I liked the Sense interface over stock Android, Touchwiz iOS and WP and the phone was comfortable in the hand. SWMBO likes Touchwiz and the daughter iOS
When I went to upgrade the phone I didn't see anything I liked and 4G wasn't getting here for at least 6 months so I went sim only and promptly cracked the screen 2 days later :P
I heard about the Jolla phone with the Sailfish OS, from those nice ex-NOKIA people and downloaded the SDK with the VM and tried it out. For 399 euros it's actually a damned good phone, but there are some rough edges regarding 4G at the moment which are still under development.
If Huawei can produce a phone that interests people as the Jolla did for me then the incumbents could find themselves losing a larger percentage of the market than they may like. They have done well for themselves so far and people can be very fickle.
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