Huawei is still making phones even as the US-China trade war puts most staunch Android component suppliers in a difficult relationship with the Chinese tech company. The new Huawei phones are the flagship Huawei P60 Pro tablet phone and the Huawei Mate X3 flagship foldable smartphone.
The trade war makes these phones unique in the Android world. First, it has a Qualcomm chip, but Huawei cannot use the latest Qualcomm technology, so the chip in both of these phones is “Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 4G mobile platform.”In addition to being last year’s chip, this is a special Huawei-only version of the chip that is labeled “4G”. 5G bands were removed from it – both mmWave and below 6 GHz.
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The OS is branded as “EMUI 13.1”, which presumably means it’s based on Android 13. Interestingly, Huawei still doesn’t brand the OS with its supposedly proprietary OS called “HarmonyOS”. In China, the specs list phones with Harmony OS 3.1, but internationally they get EMUI 13.1, Huawei’s Android shell. The company insists that Harmony OS for phones is a rival to Android and not a copy and paste of the Android source code. But when we looked at the phone version of Harmony OS 2.0 in 2021, we found a rebranded Android code with no major additions or changes other than the typical Android skin. Huawei once said its Android competitor would get an international release in 2022, butthis has not happened yet.
The Chinese and English versions of the phone promo sites use the same images and apps, despite supposedly running different operating systems. Some images in English that should only show EMUI for English markets are labeled “HarmonyOS “. Of course, the two OSes can share the same design and apps under the same brands, but if there were any real differences between EMUI (Android) and Harmony OS (presumably not Android), that would be the simplest and most obvious explanation in the world. However, Huawei simply cannot provide any real evidence – curious! It’s like Android and Harmony OS are the same OS with two different names.
The most striking part of the design is the extra-large camera hole on the back. It is only described as a 48-megapixel “Ultra Light Camera”. It’s not clear if the extra-large camera hole is for any kind of functionality or just to trick you into thinking the camera is big and impressive. If the company had used a huge 1-inch sensor like other phone makers, I suspect Huawei would have said something about it. Although the big camera looks good. It has a point-and-shoot camera design that I’ve always liked. Next to the large camera is a 13-megapixel wide-angle lens and a 48-megapixel telephoto lens with an unspecified zoom rating.