With the maturity of the market, the smartphone market is moving from simple "configuration parameter" competition to "technology content" competition. In order to stabilize the high-end mobile phone market, mainstream domestic mobile phone manufacturers are increasing investment in research and development to reduce the influence of upstream supply chain technology and components.
Recently, authoritative patent data released by THEI Claims, a veteran intellectual property information service provider, shows that in last year's US patent licensing rankings, a total of five Chinese companies were listed, namely Huawei, TSMC, BOE, Ant Financial and OPPO. Among them, OPPO ranked among the TOP50 for the first time, ranking 49th in the list, and the number of patent authorizations in the whole year increased by 33% year-on-year.
All along, OPPO has given users the impression of being more "market" than technical strength, but from the actions of recent years, OPPO seems to have moved towards the development route of "technology industry and trade" (technology first), betting on multiple technical fields of the pan-mobile phone industry chain. From the new technologies and products released by OPPO last year, we can glimpse its development model of technology-driven innovation.
Technical side: focus on images, focus on the future
In OPPO's future technology conference in the past two years, many new technologies and products are related to imaging. In 2020, the FDF full-dimensional portrait video technology system and the full-link color management system (supporting 10-bit picture and video shooting) will be further developed, and in 2021, the NPU chip and mobile phone telescopic lens solution for Mariana MariSilicon X images will be launched. It is also an exploration at the image level, but the change from software to hardware releases different market signals.
OPPO's choice to focus on the field of imaging is related to the development and future changes of the industry. In terms of smart phones, the competition in the high-end mobile phone market in recent years is actually the competition of the mobile phone image strength of major manufacturers, at this stage, the mobile phone photography is a basic item of the industry, on the basis of which the software and hardware differentiation is the key to competition, xiaomi and vivo that want to impact the high-end mobile phone market are also mainly engaged in self-developed imaging technology.
In terms of the future direction of the industry, imaging technology is closely related to the next generation of mobile smart terminals. At a pledge conference held by Huawei in 2015, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei stressed in his speech, "Huawei has missed the voice era and the data age, and we have not occupied the strategic highland of the world, and we can no longer miss the image era." In the author's view, the so-called image era not only refers to mobile phone photography, but also includes the image analysis ability and perception ability of future AR/VR and other devices, which is reflected in the corresponding hardware, which may also be an important reason why OPPO's first self-developed chip has not developed ISPs like the other two manufacturers, but has taken the NPU route.
Although OPPO calls the Mariana MariSilicon X chip an "image-specific NPU", the NPU that combines the image processing unit and the AI processing unit, namely the MariLumi image unit and the MariNeuro AI unit, has an AI computing power of 18 TOPs, which is stronger than the 15.8 TOPs of the full-blooded A15 on the iPhone 13 Pro Max, and the power consumption can be reduced to 11.6 TOPs per watt.
The Mariana X, which takes into account both computing power and power consumption, is naturally suitable for equipment such as AR glasses that need to consider lightweight design, and the previous Google Glass was trapped in the problem of endurance and performance. In the context of battery technology is still difficult to have major technological breakthroughs, most can only improve product endurance through chip design and algorithms, so the home of Mariana X can not only be a mobile phone, but also the next generation of "smart" AR devices.
In the transformation of technology and multi-products, NPU has more advantages than ISPs. From the product point of view, NPU is very small, but it is the core carrier of smart phone AI capabilities, in the industrial end of the NPU belongs to the large category of AI chips development prospects are very broad, can be used in server-side and automatic driving and other fields, such as Huawei's Ascend 910 AI processor and Tesla FSD autopilot chip.
In addition to the Core Mariana plan, OPPO also has an Amazon plan for cloud services, and it is foreseeable that OPPO, which is explored in the NPU field at this time, is the next big game. On the one hand, through the image NPU chip to enhance the mobile phone photography capabilities and product uniqueness, which is also the OPPO mobile phone impact high-end practical needs; on the other hand, the development of NPU chip accumulated technology and patents, is to prepare for the future of professional AI chip research and development, to serve the company's cloud computing and other "second growth curve" and the next generation of AR equipment.
However, it should also be said that OPPO's technology is very forward-looking, but it may be limited by the industry software ecosystem or other supporting hardware problems, and at this stage it cannot bring too many improvements in the user experience to most users, such as the full-link 10bit color management system on the OPPO Find X3 series.
Product side: from concept to mass production
OPPO's previous future technology conferences are often called "show muscle conferences" by netizens, and many new products and new technologies have been released, but they are not productive from time to time, and last year's scroll screen mobile phones and AR glasses are typical. However, the 2021 science and technology conference is different, OPPO has significantly accelerated the speed of mass production of products.
Let's take a look at OPPO's first mass-produced folding screen product, OPPO Find N. In the exploration of new forms of mobile phones, OPPO has tried a variety of different solutions, in addition to the more conceptual scroll screen, OPPO has also tried to fold up and down and fold out folding screen schemes, but finally chose a more mature in-folding program, which makes OPPO Find N have a little compromise and persistence in product temperament.
The "compromise" mentioned here is not a pejorative meaning, but in the new market competition environment, it is necessary for manufacturers to stand up and break the situation of high prices of folding screen products, expand the audience of products, and reduce the starting price is not to reduce the premise of product experience, which is both necessary and the situation appears on OPPO Find N.
(Image from OPPO's official Weibo)
OPPO's dare to say goodbye to the concept product to launch a more affordable Find N may be related to the development strategy of its mobile phone business. After Huawei's chip foundry is limited, it is Apple that eats the domestic high-end mobile phone market, and the better performance is the vivo of the video experience on the X series, OPPO needs a blockbuster flagship to impact the high-end.
From the perspective of product design and form, OPPO is making folding screens with the idea of making mobile phones to ensure the characteristics and audience of the product. OPPO Find N's unique 18:9 ratio outer screen and compact body are pulled in and pulled into the physical distance between themselves and ordinary mobile phones, as far as possible for 6.7-inch large-screen Android phones. Impacting the high-end in the form of cracking down on traditional mobile phones through folding screen dimensionality reduction can not only boost the share of OPPO mobile phones in the high-end market, but also enhance the brand's high-end sense and cultivate user minds.
That is to say, the change of OPPO product ideas is for market competition and accelerate the speed of transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and then explore the development boundary of concept products and mass-produced products, and the market does not want to lose the uniqueness of products.
The OPPO Air Glass smart glasses, which will be released in 2022, have a 30-gram body, 1.3 mm lenses and a variety of interaction methods, in order to improve the ease of use and uniqueness of the product and achieve mass production. Of course, not completely embracing supply chain design is a certain price to pay, in addition to the software needs to be re-adapted, there will also be capacity problems, and now OPPO Find N online channels still need to make an appointment to buy.
What will happen in 2022?
In the past year, the development of OPPO has not been smooth, although the sales of European and Canadian mobile phones have increased to a certain extent, but it has also exposed the problems such as difficult breakthroughs in the high-end market and product line chaos, and OPPO's 2022 probability is inseparable from the two keywords of "strengthening" and "adjustment".
The first is "strengthening", compared with the flagship mobile phones of other domestic brands, OPPO and oneplus' flagship machines last year do not have much advantage in products. The hardware of Xiaomi and vivo flagship machines on the image is more sufficient, and they have used the outsole CMOS to increase the upper limit of mobile phone photography, and the 65W flash charge advantage of OPPO on the charging is not obvious, and some competitors even use 100 watts wired fast charging and 50W wireless flash charging.
With the release of the self-developed NPU, what OPPO can do is to narrow the distance between itself and the top image flagship through the self-developed chip. Judging from the recent exposure information, OPPO's Find X5 series is taking the route of computational photography, still shooting IMX766, mainly relying on self-developed NPU and algorithm to enhance the image strength of mobile phones, while wired fast charging will be increased to 80W. Personally, I think that the OPPO flagship will still not take the absolute hardware stacking route, but more to strengthen the comprehensive experience of mobile phone software and hardware.
The second is "adjustment", some mobile phones in the European and Canadian system have the problem of overlapping positioning, and some product lines compete with each other due to similar hardware. In the product line, the image NPU may be an important symbol of OPPO to distinguish between different flagship product lines, and the Find X5 series of the first self-developed NPU is running to vivo X and Huawei P series. The OnePlus flagship will emphasize its own game attributes, and Li Jie, president of OnePlus China, emphasized in an interview, "The appearance, game experience, performance optimization, and charging experience of OnePlus products will have the characteristics and expertise of the brand itself." ”
It is foreseeable that the competition in the domestic smartphone market will enter a white-hot stage in 2022, and OPPO is seeking new breakthroughs through the integration and adjustment of self-developed technology and product lines. At present, the sales gap between domestic TOP3 mobile phone manufacturers is not large, for OPPO, the goal in 2022 is not only to win the sales champion of the domestic mobile phone market, but also to open up the sales gap between other manufacturers, and the self-developed technology and multi-product line layout is where its own confidence lies.