back to article Huawei: There'll be BLOOD spilled in the smartphone sector soon

The smartphone stragglers are set to fall further behind the leading pack and some will likely crash and burn in the not-too-distant future, according to one of the device chiefs at Huawei. Industry consolidation is inevitable, said Shao Yang, veep of marketing for the consumer business group at the Chinese giant, which is …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If Huawei are the future....

    .... I'm going to keep my phone working as long as possible..

    Got given one of their Y300 "mid range" phones to replace my stolen HTC and it was really dreadful:

    Horrible user interface (fixed by a new launcher and subsequently a different ROM)

    Only 512Mb RAM so it was horribly slow and clunky - no real fix for the frequent reboots when it ran out

    1. Semtex451

      Re: If Huawei are the future....

      From memory the P7 reviewed well.

    2. Tapeador

      Re: If Huawei are the future....

      I've had to revive my Huawei G300 Ascend, for complicated financial reasons. Nobody can understand a word I say on it, at all, the voice quality is that bad. Put the SIM in a 13 year old Nokia, no problem. 512mb RAM also rules out a whooole lot of software, even the latest Gmail update. It's pretty painful to use.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If Huawei are the future....

      Y300 midrange? You can get it for £8 a month so I'd class it low end.

      Get your hands on a P7, you'll be pleasantly surprised, as for the P8...Anon for that reason.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Out of the horse's mouth

    These Huawei execs keep telling it like it is. Hasn't the US PR industry reached China yet?

  3. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    FAIL

    "R&D"?

    That's a new name for "slap some generic stuff in a slim case and bung Android on it (badly)"

    Huawei phones are a bit grim, but not as grim as some of the other stuff you can get. The cheapo phone I have here cannot be used when charging, as the electrical interference from the charger disturbs the digitiser too much. Oh, and it only has 512mb of RAM. That's luxury - some have only 256!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "R&D"?

      I wondered about that as well. This year's phones are the same as last year's, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on. Upping performance specs, using faster forms of wireless/cellular, making the screen/battery bigger, randomly throwing on some little bits like NFC and wireless charging do not require a large R&D budget and do not require a "brand name" to sell.

    2. Fungus Bob

      Re: "luxury"

      "it only has 512mb of RAM"

      When I were a lad phones were made of carbon and wire.

      1. Anonymous John

        Re: "luxury"

        When I were a lad, phones were made of two tin cans and some string.

        1. Tapeador

          Re: "luxury"

          You had string? You were LUCKY. When I were a lad, we had to bang pan on the coal stove in morse code if we wanted to communicate owt.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "luxury"

            Oooh, we dreamed of a coal stove. We 'ad to carve messages into t'rock with our fingernails - and woe betide us if we went over 140 characters or father would strangle us with a charger cable.

          2. Anonymous John

            Re: "luxury"

            You had a pan and a coal stove? We had to send Morse by banging our heads on the pavement.

          3. Chika
            Happy

            Re: "luxury"

            To quote a passage from HHGTG:

            "The secret is to bang the rocks together!"

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "R&D"?

      Just use a decent charger. I've had the same problem with a Jebus phone and a cheapo charger.. The DC just isn't stabilized well.

      Apple ones are excellent, Samsung are very good.

  4. Luben Solev

    This is in contrast to the ascertion of other Reg stories..

    ...where the thought that local phone suppliers would begin to make inroads into the market share of established brands.

    Which one is right nobody knows. Maybe it is the middle ground that gets killed with people either going for global brands like Samsung or for very local ones.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny then how a new player like OnePlus One (oneplus.net) can come along a create a brilliant 5.5" 64GB phone with a sensible 13mp 2.0f camera for 300 euros that beats all other Android phones on price and POSSIBLY hardware and software features. And it sure gives the new iPhone 6 Pro a good spanking too at nearly 1/3 the cost.

    So as long as there are good engineers that can respond to customer needs, small players will always exist.

    Samsung make good hardware, but are completely incompetent at software. I got so annoyed with my Samsung S5, I give it away last week and got a OnePlus One instead.

    Best bit about OnePlus One for me is its sensible OS - Android mod CyanogenMod. It's easy to use and customize, contains no crap apps, and its settings permit control over application permissions using Privacy Guard - Google Android would never allow that.

    Can wait until someone brings out a dual boot smartphone (Android and Ubuntu). Then I can use it at work for Java enterprise development, and retire the MacBook Pro :-)

    Just my two cents.

    1. Andy Nugent

      OnePlus One

      Except you can't buy a OnePlus phone, it's only available if you have an invite from entering competitions, promoting them via social media, etc.

      IF they start shipping them in numbers at that price while that's still considered a high spec, then great, lets start taking them seriously.

      But at the moment, it's pure marketing. I'm guessing they're making a loss on the very low number of phones sold at the moment to try and build hype, and will then release on scale when/if the bill of materials approaches the break even point.

      1. Mr Q

        Re: OnePlus One

        Opps...another URL. I avoided the invite and bought the phone at oneplus.EU. although they charge an extra 25 euros for doing so.

    2. Moosh

      I'm not usually one to claim this, but this seems awfully like marketing to me. Everyone knows what the One is, you don't need to link to their site in your opening sentence.

    3. coppice

      OnePlus One

      OnePlus One is hardly a new player. Its just a new marketing ploy from a large established company.

  6. kpbpsw

    While it is true that Huawei is going to be a big player in the low end and everyone's low end biz is threatened it is NOT true about the need for massive R&D budgets as most of the expensive development work is out sourced for everyone including Apple (Samsung does much o f the work with in the Big Company but that is sold to many not just their handset biz). The battle for key components including processor, memory, radios, screens etc. is not done the handset manufacture, and the bigger issues is about getting access to the latest stuff, not the cost of developing the latest stuff.

    Also their telecom experience is only really useful form the sales relationship side, the technology is done my Qualcom and Intel not the phone manufactures. If Huawei does anything them selves it is to copy Qualcom and that may give them a slight short term price advantage but it will also land them in trouble with patents and have to pay royalties outside of China to off set any price advantage.

    1. Chris G

      Huawei make some pretty good phones; at €175 my Ascend G700 still gets my work mates impressed after a year and that has been left behind by most of the latest offerings from China this year.

      With 8core Arm processors or the latest from Snapdragon or Intel and constant improvements in graphics processing from QualcomAdreno they are winning in the Asian markets.

      When you think China has over 1.2 billion phone users out of 1.3 billion population and India their next biggest customer has a .9 billion market. Even if their research and development is seeing how much of other peoples goodies they can cram into a slim case they are still being driven by the demand from an increasingly sophisticated market.

      Also consider their share of the router and dongle market mostly sold as their own but also badged, there is one not that far from you now.

      If a large Chinese company says publicly it is going to do something it will by god do it's best to achieve what it says otherwise they will lose 'face', something very important in Chinese and Japanese culture.

      Look to your laurels Western Companies!

      1. phil dude
        Meh

        But...

        the western companies have those pesky human rights and H&S to deal with...

        Well for now anyway...

        P.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        > my Ascend G700 still gets my work mates impressed after a year

        You're one of those people eh?

        I act impressed by my work mates phones too, even though I think a tin can on a string is better. Either I act impressed and he quickly walks off to impress the next person or I tell him what I really think of it and he_doesn't_leave until I give in to his argument of why his phone is amazing. Its just easier to pat him on the head and send him on his way...

        1. Chris G

          Not one of those

          @AC Why not just give an honest opinion and leave it at that, and while you are adjusting consider this , you have no idea what kind of person I am. The things I buy are usually chosen as a combination of price and function to give value for money as long as they can fulfill my requirements, I don't actually give a rat's arse what anyone else thinks of my purchases but tend to notice when someone thinks something is good as it reinforces my opinion, if they think it's shit I will do more research before buying again if usage bares out what they say..

          So thank you for your patronising comment, perhaps I could pat you on the head if ever I meet you!

  7. DerekCurrie
    Thumb Down

    Would Huawei exist without being propped up by the Chinese government?

    Doubt it. That's not capitalism. So stop pretending you're 'competing' Huawei.

    Hand puppet.

    1. Tapeador

      Re: Would Huawei exist without being propped up by the Chinese government?

      So true, but then it's all a question of degree: we subsidise credit and throughput in our economies in the West through insuring banks, and through a wide variety of mechanisms, e.g. redistribution, automatic stabilisers, infrastructure builds, socialisation of healthcare to keep costs down, etc etc.

      Granted, China take it to an astonishing degree.

  8. truetalk
    Holmes

    Long live HTC

    I've had Samsung, Huawei and HTC phones and I've always found HTC to be the most reliable in terms of hardware and their implementation of Android. The M8 is a stunning top of the range phone. When I change my phone again in two or three years I hope HTC will still be around as that will most likely be the one I buy. Huawei were excellent value for money, Samsung were awful with software reliability. The Samsung phone was so full of bugs and Samsung never fixed them, just brought out a new buggy phone. Has put me right off Samsung phones for a long long time. Love their TVs though !

    1. Chika
      Happy

      Re: Long live HTC

      I've never used HTC phones, to be honest, but the fact is that every time I buy something with the name Samsung on it, something goes wrong, usually by design. I have a Samsung TV that keeps blanking its screen for no reason. I had a Samsung DVD player years ago that wouldn't play dual layer discs as "it wasn't designed for that".

      I've only ever had one Huawei device. A phone. An Ascend. The only problem I've had was that the battery cacked out about a year ago, so I replaced it with a slightly bigger after market one. Other than that, I have had no trouble with it and it works well.

      I'd buy another if there was one in the range that I was happy with, but I'm a little dubious about the direction Huawei are going in.

      Horses for courses, methinks.

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