[Text/Observer.com Lu Dong Editor/Zhang Guangkai]
Recently, research agency Counterpoint released data on China's mobile phone market, showing that in the first six weeks of this year, only Huawei and Honor mobile phones achieved sales growth in China. Among them, Huawei's mobile phones have risen the most, rushing to the second place in China with a growth rate of 64% and a share of 17%, while Honor ranks third with a growth rate of 2% and a share of 16%, and Apple's sales plummeted by 24% to rank fourth.
This week, Zhao Ming, the CEO of Honor, who returned from Bazhan, was interviewed by Observer.com and other media in Beijing. When asked whether Huawei's sudden increase in sales has put pressure on Honor, he said that Huawei's good development is a driving force for everyone, making the mobile phone industry full of innovation, competition and vitality, "When the market becomes more and more mediocre, consumer attention will be reduced, and the replacement cycle will be extended." ”
In Zhao Ming's view, it is even more important to make consumers enthusiastic about the mobile phone industry. "Back ten years ago, there were 450 million to 500 million mobile phone smart terminals a year (sales), so what we imagine is not how a strong opponent will come in, but how we can work together to make the industry full of vitality and innovation, and make the entire industry bigger. We should work together to innovate and compete. ”
Glory CEO Zhao Ming Source: Observer.com
Since breaking away from Huawei at the end of 2020, Honor has been independent for more than three years. When talking about the mental journey of more than three years, Zhao Ming said frankly, "You have to say that it is impossible to have no original shadow." But after becoming independent, in different soils, this branch has to take root again, and when it has its own experience, just like different AI training data, the results it produces will also have great variations. ”
Prior to this interview, Honor released a number of new products in Beijing, including the Honor Magic6 Ultimate, which starts at 6999 yuan, the Honor Magic6 RSR Porsche Design that starts at 9999 yuan, and the laptop Honor MagicBook Pro 16, which starts at 5999 yuan.
Judging from the price alone, the Honor Magic6 series covers the 4000-10000 yuan price range. If you break it down, the price of the high-end version of the Honor Magic6 Ultimate Edition is close to 8000 yuan, which is no longer close to the price distance from the Porsche design version, and it seems to overlap in positioning.
This can't help but make people wonder, with the Magic6 Ultimate, why does Honor launch the Porsche Design Edition?
The scene of the glory press conference Source: Observer.com
Zhao Ming explained to the observer.com that Honor needs two product series, Ultimate and Porsche, to carry the demands of innovation, "In the Magic6 RSR Porsche design, we use the Tandem screen, and at the same time, we hope that things like LOFIC LiDAR array and King Kong Giant Rhino Glass can have a wider range of applications, and multi-product series support is the only and not many options at present." ”
Different from the industry's common use of "1-inch outsole" to improve image performance, the Honor Magic6 Ultimate introduces autonomous driving industry technology into the imaging system, and is the industry's first image sensor based on LOFIC lateral overflow collection capacitance technology, which achieves a 900% increase in optoelectronic capacity and finally achieves 15EV dynamic range, and is also equipped with a 1200-point LiDAR array focusing system.
Zhao Ming said frankly that many manufacturers use 1-inch outsoles today, but almost every design will damage the user experience in terms of ID, because it is too thick. Mobile phone photography includes bottom, sensitivity, aperture and optoelectronic conversion, LOFIC is to solve the problem of optoelectronic conversion, "simple and rude to make the bottom bigger, sacrificing ID, the solution is too simple".
The Magic6 RSR Porsche Design is Honor's second Porsche Design model. One of the major features of this model is that it is the first Glory Stacked Oasis eye protection screen based on Tandem dual-stack series OLED architecture, providing two stacked RGB light-emitting layers, with BOE K2 light-emitting materials, bringing 50% improvement in luminous efficiency, reaching 1000nits manual peak brightness and 1800nits global peak brightness.
According to Honor's introduction, the Tandem dual-stack series OLED architecture can allow the screen to achieve lower current, lower power consumption, and slower aging speed under the same luminous brightness. Experimental tests show that the higher the set brightness of the screen, the higher the power consumption benefit of the Honor Dieguang Oasis eye protection screen, up to 40%. Honor has also improved its algorithm to increase the life of the screen by up to 6 times.
However, this solution is "extremely difficult to produce, and it is particularly difficult to mass-produce". Zhao Ming said frankly to the observer, "Tandem's dual-stack tandem technology is clear from the production principle, but when it comes to mass production, BOE and Honor have withstood a hellish test, and the yield rate is still relatively low today." It will take us quite a long time to solve the problem of mass production of this screen. ”
The scene of the glory press conference Source: Observer.com
The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is positioned by Honor as an AI PC. It is powered by up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor and supports up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card. In terms of device-side AI capabilities, the MagicBook Pro 16 can realize document content search and accurate search of image content, while at the device-cloud collaboration level, this notebook can realize AI document summary, AI subtitle translation, AI note minutes and other functions, and can also achieve cross-device intelligent interconnection through MagicRing.
Despite the bright hardware configuration, Zhao Ming emphasized more on Honor's own understanding of AI, and put forward the statement of AI's four-layer architecture.
Layer 1: AI enables cross-system integration, allowing different operating systems to make decisions through AI, and realize seamless connection and data sharing between mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices; Layer 2: Using AI to reconstruct the operating system, so that mobile phones can understand you more and use them more and better, and the new human-computer interaction method based on intent recognition is a typical example; Layer 3: AI device-side applications, such as cutouts, photo rendering, and document summarization; Layer 4: AI device-cloud collaboration to present network AI large model applications.
"If you want to say which layer of AI is more valuable, there is no doubt that if you want to present a fast-food style to consumers today, partners will open up (make some applications) based on your chips and computing power, such as Meitu and other various beauty appeals can be realized, but this is not the most fundamental, there are a large number of developers and third parties that can provide this kind of application in the future. Therefore, for terminal manufacturers, they should start from the first layer, the second layer, and take into account the third layer of some applications. Zhao Ming said.
After talking about many technological advances, Zhao Ming also disclosed the R&D intensity of Honor in recent years. He said that in 2021, Honor's investment will account for 10.5%, 11% in 2022, and 11.5% in 2023, "In 2024, with the growth of revenue, R&D investment will account for more than 11%."
But he also clarified that Honor will not make a general cloud model. "General like ChatGPT, Sora is not the core development direction of Honor at present, our 11.5% of R & D expenses, even if doubled, the core strategy and development logic are still different, this general large model we will still choose Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and other general large model partners for cooperation, our core is still focused on the first layer of the end side, the second layer and some of the third layer of AI applications, the fourth layer is not the core focus. ”
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