According to
Huawei Central, the Mate 70 series will be released next September, timed to go up head-to-head with the
iPhone 16 line, at least in China. Back in October, the
iPhone 15 Pro Max was the best-selling smartphone in China with a 5% share of the market compared with the 4% share earned by the Mate 60 Pro and the
iPhone 15 Pro. For the entire fourth quarter of 2023, Apple owned a leading 20.2% of the Chinese smartphone market while Huawei was third at 15.2% following a 71.1% year-over-year hike thanks to the Mate 60 series.
For the whole year,
Apple led with 17.3% of smartphone sales in the world’s top smartphone-buying country. Former Huawei sub-brand Honor was second with a 17.1% share. Huawei was not in the top five. Weibo blogger @SmartPikachu says that the Mate 70 line could be the most powerful handset series in the market later this year. That seems impossible unless Huawei is able to get access to cutting-edge application processors built using a 3nm process node. Currently, SMIC isn’t able to produce chips with a node under 7nm.
The Huawei Mate 70 series is the subject of this Weibo post by @SmartPikachu
Lower process nodes mean smaller transistors which means that more can fit inside a chip. The higher a chip’s transistor count, the more powerful and/or energy-efficient a chip is. We could see a new Kirin chip power the Mate 70 line, but with SMIC unable to buy an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine from ASML, breaking the 7nm barrier will be extremely difficult for SMIC and Huawei.
The next flagship series due from Huawei is the photography-based P70 line. Huawei is also said to be working on the Pocket S2, the second-generation clamshell foldable from the company. As for the Mate 70, @SmartPikachu says that the Mate 70 could sport a quad-curved display. It could also debut 5.5G technology and include a 1-inch type camera sensor, and a display with thinner and more uniform bezels.
