Huawei mobile phones

Huawei, or in full Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., is a Chinese company focused on telecommunications and consumer electronics. It is one of the largest phone manufacturers in the world.

Huawei verdict

There's some confusion how to pronounce Huawei. Despite the fact that it is very normal to say "hu-ah-wah" here, the official pronunciation is "wha-weeh". The company undertook a clever attempt in 2012 with an advertising campaign to get the public to say the official name. It had little effect and in Dutch-language advertising it now also uses "hu-ah-noise".

Huawei series

Huawei uses the Android platform for its phones and places them in various series. The two most important are the P-series consisting of flagships with a beautiful design and the Mate series which consists mainly of more powerful and larger flagships. The whole line-up exists or consisted of the following series;

• Mate - Large high-end flagships with the latest techniques
• P - High-end flagships focused on design
• nova - For youthful audiences and focused on gaming
• Y - Cheap entry-level models

The company used the name 'Ascend' from 2012 to 2015 but abandoned it because it added little. It also stopped with the G and W series, the first of which consisted of mid-range and the second of Windows Phone models.

EMUI

Huawei's smartphones run on Google's Android operating system with EMUI on top of it. This is a so-called skin with a different layout and extra functions. EMUI stands for Emotion UI and is updated every year by Huawei.

Unlike standard Android and many other Android user interfaces, EMUI does not have a separate app menu, the so-called app-drawer. This makes it more like iOS that Apple uses on its iPhones. Since EMUI 5 there is an option to activate this. To do so, search for Start screen style > Drawer.

Honor

In addition to releasing phones under its own name, it also releases models under the name Honor. This is a sub-brand, aimed at a young audience whose models have a relatively low price. Huawei manages to get that price so low by keeping most of its sales in its own hands. Removing the middlemen results in a lower price. This has the disadvantage that Honor phones (especially in the beginning) were sometimes difficult to obtain.

Spionage

Huawei is often accused of espionage in Western countries. Under U.S. leadership, many other countries refrained from engaging Huawei to roll out 5G networks because of eavesdropping concerns. The US has not (yet) provided any real concrete evidence of this. However, the incident with Tappy from T-Mobile is often mentioned. That was a robotic arm with finger that T-Mobile used to test new smartphones. After stealing a Tappy arm by Huawei employees, an exact copy was reconstructed. Both companies closed a deal in 2017, averting a lawsuit.

Dream It Possible

Anyone who has ever watched a Huawei product launch will have heard it; Huawei's body song: Dream It Possible. The song sung by singer Delacey has reached a bit of a cult status because of his melodramatic tones and tear-jerking music video.

Because we hear the song less and less during keynotes we recorded it above. We're fans, hopefully you are too.