HUAWEI Technologies started accepting pre-orders Monday for its latest flagship smartphone series, the Mate 70, scheduled to officially launch next Tuesday. As of press time yesterday, the Shenzhen-based tech giant had already amassed over 2.27 million reservations on its official online store, vmall.com, which didn’t count in orders made at physical outlets. A salesperson in Beijing mentioned that their store required customers to pay a 1,000-yuan (US$138) deposit for the new phone, whereas online reservations did not incur any charges. Huawei announced a product launch event next Tuesday to introduce the Mate 70 lineup officially. While the prices for the Mate 70 series have not been disclosed yet, its predecessor, the Mate 60 series, launched last September with prices ranging between 5,499 yuan and 6,499 yuan. The Mate 70 will be available in black, white, pale green, and lilac colors, while the more sophisticated Mate 70 Pro will offer color choices in white, black, gold with silver, and apsaras green —inspired by fairy garments depicted in Dunhuang murals. The former will have 12 GB of RAM, whereas the Pro version will come with 16 GB. Both phones will feature a slightly curved screen delivering an immersive visual experience, as reported by Chinese media. This series will be the first to feature Huawei’s in-house operating system, HarmonyOS Next, along with its own Kirin chips. HarmonyOS NEXT was launched independently of the Android architecture Oct. 22. It is said to enhance mobile device performance by 30%, increase battery life by 56 minutes, and reserve an average of 1.5GB of memory for non-operating system functions. In contrast to earlier versions of HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS NEXT no longer supports Android apps. Major Chinese platforms such as Meituan, Douyin, Taobao, Xiaohongshu, Alipay, and JD.com have developed native apps for the new OS, according to Huawei. China’s smartphone market remains strong. Shipments grew for the fourth quarter in a row in the three months ended Sept. 30, gaining 3.2% from a year ago to 68.8 million units, as per a report by International Data Corporation. Huawei had the third-largest market share at 15.3%. While reports suggest that Huawei’s Mate 60 series sold over 10 million units in the first 10 months post-launch last year, the company has yet to confirm this figure. Guoyuan Securities indicated in a mid-July research note that Huawei is expected to ship between 3.2 million and 3.5 million Mate 70 phones this year. The Mate 70 will be joining a fiercely competitive marketplace, with sales of Apple’s iPhone 16 series having been boosted by various promotions, including a price cut during the recent Double 11 shopping festival. Apple’s newest handset was already proving popular in the Chinese market, with iPhone 16 sales 20% higher in the first three weeks after launch than those of the iPhone 15 series, data from Counterpoint Research showed.(Li Dan) | 