With Huawei’s P20 Pro last year and this year’s P30 Pro, the company pulled off some incredible camera innovations, at least in the photo department. In terms of recording video, it hasn’t done as much. Part of the reason for this is because the Kirin 970 and Kirin 980 chipsets don’t support recording video at 4K 60fps, a feature that you’d expect from such camera-centric smartphones.
Luckily, that’s about to change with the next generation. While I was in Shenzhen for the past week, Huawei confirmed that the Kirin 990 will indeed support recording video at 4K 60fps. Starting with the Mate 30 series, you’ll no longer have to choose between a high resolution and a high frame rate.
It’s incredible how fast Chinese companies manage to improve. If you ever wonder why the United States government is trying to hit Huawei so hard, it’s because of things like this. Aside from the possibly valid spying concerns, Huawei is simply also a major competitor to Silicon Valley, and this is a great way for American corporations/government to strike back.
There aren’t many companies who can make every part of a device. Huawei is one of them.
It wasn’t just the U.S. that banned them for espionage though. Definitely seems like a case of intelligence networks sharing the evidence, but the public isn’t going to see it for 30 years as the information would be used by China to figure out how they were caught.
Pro-Huawei point of view:
The U.S. didn’t ban them for espionage. They banned them for fear of espionage in the future. No evidence was ever provided or shared and all countries, except for the Five Eyes, are still buying Huawei equipment because it is simply the best while still being affordable. Huawei is clearly just the victim of the Trump/America tradewar against China. All complaints are about network equipment, yet other hardware like phones suddenly were banned as well
Con-Huawei point of view:
The ties between Huawei and the Chinese government are too big to ignore. Backdoors in their network equipment have been found and more importantly, could be added by a simple updated in the future. Huawei is also a notoriously unfair/copying company that has stolen intellectual property and has been caught dealing with banned countries like Iran via obviously illegal shell-companies.
My point of view:
Huawei is a company with shady government ties and a bad reputation for playing by the rules. However the main argument about spying doesn’t make much sense because if this was really the problem there wouldn’t have been a 3 month reprieve of the ban twice now.
Very detailed timeline: https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-ban-full-timeline-on-how-why-its-phones-are-under-fire/
“Really” banned?: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-huawei-ncsc-usa/five-eyes-will-not-use-huawei-in-sensitive-networks-senior-us-official-idUSKCN1S01CZ