Huawei remains silent about Mate 70 chip at smartphone launch, focuses on Android rival HarmonyOS

Huawei technologies kept an eye on what chip improvements are in the Mate 70 series smartphones during a launch event on Tuesday, as the tech giant looks to take a bigger bite out of the smartphone Apple‘s market share in China.

Richard Yu Chengdongchairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, took the stage in Shenzhen to unveil the Mate 70 and three more premium handsets in the same line, with a starting price of 5,499 yuan (US$760). He called the new series “the most powerful Mate phones in history,” without mentioning details about the processor powering them.

Instead, Yu emphasized the HarmonyOS Next operating system, which the company claims offers 40 percent better performance on the latest smartphones than the Mate 60 series. HarmonyOS Next is Huawei’s mobile operating system that has diverged so much from Android that it is no longer compatible with those apps.

Huawei also touted its latest product artificial intelligence (AI) features, such as photo enhancement and hand gestures, including the ability to grab and release images to share across devices.

The release of the Mate 70 was closely watched by the industry, looking for clues that it could go beyond the Chinese-made processor in last year’s Mate 60 devices. That chip would have been produced by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) using a 7 nanometer process. US sanctions on Huawei and SMIC have sought to limit access to such technology.