Huawei Announces Last Major Phone Before US Ban Forces Rethink

Huawei introduced the Mate 40 smartphone series on Thursday, potentially its last major release powered by its self-designed Kirin chips. From a report: China's biggest tech company by sales has been stockpiling chips to get its signature device out in time to compete with Apple's iPhone 12 over the holidays. Huawei will have to overhaul its smartphone lineup after Trump administration sanctions that took effect in September curtailed its ability to design and manufacture advanced in-house chips by cutting it off from the likes of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The company's consumer devices group, led by Richard Yu, was already prevented from shipping handsets with the full Google-augmented Android experience. But that didn't stop it from surpassing Samsung Electronics to become the world's best-selling smartphone maker in the summer, largely on the strength of growing domestic sales. Without a contractor to produce its own chips or the ability to buy processors from a supplier like Qualcomm, prognostications for the division's future are less rosy. The 6.5-inch Mate 40 and 6.76-inch Mate 40 Pro feature the 5nm Kirin 9000 processor, second to Apple's A14 chip to offer that advanced manufacturing node in consumer devices. The system-on-chip contains 15.3 billion transistors, including eight CPU cores maxing out at a speed of 3.13GHz and 24 GPU cores that Huawei claims give it 52% faster graphics than Qualcomm's best offering. Both devices have sloping glass sides and in-display fingerprint sensors. The new rear "Space Ring" design accommodating Huawei's multi-camera system is reminiscent of the control wheel of iPods of yesteryear. It plays host to a 50-megapixel main camera accompanied by zoom and ultrawide lenses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.