Huawei Challenges Samsung in Foldable Phone Race; Huawei Ban Raised at MWC

As industry observers study the latest smartphone designs, the biggest unknown is the bendable screens' long-term durability. Engadget editor Chris Velazco mused Monday on what the outcome will be when a user inevitability sits with a bendable phone in his back pocket. In everyday use, Huawei pegged the number of folds the Mate can withstand at 100,000 Sunday; when it launched last week in San Francisco, Samsung gave 200,000 as the number of folds for its phone.

Huawei describes the Mate X’s Falcon Wing design as a “stretchable hinge” designed to “dissolve into the device.” It's designed not to stretch while folding nor bulge during unfolding, it says.

Foldables are grabbing headlines at MWC as the next big thing in smartphones, but analysts are reining in expectations. Canalys' Nicole Peng said vendors are setting realistic expectations for sales. More foldables will launch at MWC, but Samsung and Huawei will have most of the category’s sales this year. High shipment volumes “are not the priority,” said Peng: “The goal is to capture consumer awareness, and each vendor wants to prove it can achieve the greatest technological advances with its new industrial designs.”

One such advance is the Mate X’s Leica triple lens camera array. The Mate’s design eliminates the need for a selfie camera since the same lenses, located on the device's spine, can be used for the phone's front and back, and subjects can see themselves as they’re being photographed. Called "mirror shooting," the dual-screen design allows lets subjects preview a shot in real-time from both sides.

First-generation pricing around $2,000 for the “exclusively ultra-luxury devices” will restrain sales: “2019 will not be the year that foldable phones go mainstream,” said Canalys, predicting sales under 2 million units. The “fold-out” design of the Mate X, with the screen on the outside, will lead to less expensive devices, said Canalys' Ben Stanton, and manufacturers won’t need to supply as many cameras as the three Leica camera lenses in the Mate X. Phone makers offering foldable models this year “must ensure excellent quality and durability,” said Stanton: “Any early teething problems or breakages will sour the foldable form-factor before it has had a chance.”

MWC Notebook

Vodafone CEO Nick Read said banning Huawei from providing 5G network equipment in Europe would harm competition there, at a Monday news conference. "If we concentrate it down to two players, I think that's an unhealthy position not just for us as an industry but also for national infrastructure," Read said, according to CNBC. CEOs of Nokia and Ericsson were interviewed, too. China's Huawei, Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson are the largest providers of telecom equipment worldwide. Borje Ekholm told CNBC Ericsson is stronger than five years ago due to a corporate turnaround. Ericsson isn’t seeing any uptick in orders because of the Huawei controversy, Ekholm said: “Almost the opposite.” Carriers are feeling uncertainty and worried over questions on Huawei, he said. There’s “no benefit,” he said: “It’s very speculative. We have no idea what’s going to happen.” Many carriers use a mix of vendors and that is “always a complex situation,” Ekholm said. Nokia's Rajeev Surav said “security will be a nonnegotiable in the world of 5G. … We focus on what we can control and we focus on security right from the start.” If 5G is delayed in Europe, it will be because of spectrum and the lack of a business case for some providers, Surav said. “Spectrum is available in some countries, not all,” he said. “Overregulation” and rules that block consolidation could be negatives, he said. There are “multiples” more operators in Europe than in countries like the U.S., China, Japan and India, Surav said: “5G will not be delayed in Europe [because of] the vendor situation."

The new generation of wireless is necessary because 4G can’t keep up with all the devices part of the growing IoT and gaming, virtual reality and autonomous vehicles require networks with almost zero latency, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said Monday. “5G meets the need for speed and volume by boosting speeds by a factor of 20 and by running on previously fallow spectrum (and using it more efficiently). And 5G meets the need to connect more devices than ever before by boosting device capacity by a factor of 1,000.” Carr emphasized actions the FCC took to cut regulation to speed deployment of network facilities needed for fifth-gen.

Qualcomm touted its role in extended reality (XR), announcing Monday ecosystem support from OEMs, operators and platform providers for interactive augmented and virtual reality experiences connected to 5G smartphones using its Snapdragon 855 mobile platform. Benefits from 5G in XR include high data rates and low latency, it said. XR viewers can be optimized and commercially ready for the mobile industry this year, it said. The company will expand its HMD (head-mounted display) Accelerator Program (HAP) to include and help pre-validate components and performance between smartphones and XR viewers, it said. XR viewers will bring a point-of-sale bundling opportunity to OEMs and new experiences to customers as 5G uses emerge, Qualcomm said. Later this year, Qualcomm and its HAP collaborators plan to release a viewer performance and compatibility badge icon. It cited Acer’s Ojo HMD VR viewer with high-resolution displays and 6 degrees-of-freedom tracking and the nreal light AR glasses as designs with USB-C connectivity that can work with the platform. The nreal light AR glasses initially required a processing box tethered to a Snapdragon 845 processing box, it said. OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi and Black Shark are expected to have Snapdragon 855-based smartphones in 2019. The increased resolution, high bandwidth and streamlined form-factor of XR viewers connected to 5G handsets offer an “evolutionary step in immersive consumer devices,” said David Cole, CEO of immersive live sports and music provider NextVR.