Huawei P70 reservation is hot, iPhone has joined forces with Google for the first time, the market is about to change?

Text/Wang Xinxi

The war of AI mobile phones is entering a scorching state.

Huawei P70 reservations are hot, and the iPhone has joined forces with Google for the first time

The release of the Mate60 series last year was seen as the beginning of Huawei's return to the mobile phone market, and the Huawei P70 series, which will be released in April, is highly anticipated and is expected to add another fire to Huawei's mobile phone sales. Now the news shows that Huawei P70 reservations are hot, suppliers increase orders by 50%, and work overtime for 24 hours a day.

According to industry reports, the P70 series is equipped with OV50H main camera with 50 million pixel resolution, and the high-end version will use Sony IMX989 1-inch outsole main camera. The screen resolution is 1.5K, and the whole system uses the latest 8TLTPO technology, which has a high refresh rate and is more power-efficient. In addition, the P70 series will be equipped with the Kirin 9 series 5G platform, and will be equipped with the Pangu large model, which will run together with the cloud and terminals. Relevant innovations are believed to drive a new round of opportunities in the mobile phone industry chain.

On March 5, Counterpoint data showed that Huawei's mobile phone sales soared by 64% in the first six weeks of this year, and its ranking also rose to second place, leaving only 1 percentage point behind the first-ranked vivo. In contrast, Apple's iPhone sales in China fell 24% year-on-year, and Huawei's market share rose from 9.4% to 16.5% in the first six weeks, surpassing Apple. Of course, this is not the endgame.

Huawei's two core press conferences are spring and autumn, and autumn is the M series, and spring is the P series. The P70 release for spring is scheduled for April of this year.

In addition to the Kirin chip and 5G, one of the attractions of this mobile phone is that it is equipped with a large Pangu model, which is Huawei's first AI mobile phone in the true sense.

In 2023, Huawei released the Pangu large model and took the lead in implementing the integrated application of the large model in smartphones, among which the Pangu NLP large model is the world's largest Chinese language AI training large model. The Pangu CV model is the first AI model that takes into account image discrimination and generation capabilities, and Huawei's Pangu model is actually already used by many companies, and it is the strongest in the domestic camp without controversy, and it also surpasses many competitors such as Samsung.

From the chip point of view, some bloggers revealed in the early days that the P70 standard version tests the same Kirin 9000S as the Mate 60, but there is a difference in the chip frequency between the standard version and the Pro version - the standard version uses the Kirin 9000S, then the Pro/Art version will use a higher frequency version.

This means that the P70 is likely to surpass the existence of the M60 in all directions.

In fact, the rise of Huawei's Mate60 series has rapidly changed the market pattern, Apple has felt the danger, and this time Huawei has offered its first AI mobile phone, at this time, Apple's sense of urgency and crisis is very strong.

Apple has recently made a big move to jointly develop AI phones with Google, and according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Apple is negotiating to embed Google's Gemini artificial intelligence model into the iPhone.

This cooperation breaks the confrontation between the two sides for many years in the past, because they are both facing Huawei, Google is worried that Huawei's HarmonyOS will further erode the Android market, and Apple is worried that Huawei will further erode its share of the Chinese market.

AI phones are becoming a trend. Xiaomi's 6 billion parameter-level large model, vivo and OPPO's self-developed large models and other products all demonstrate the powerful power of AI in the field of mobile phones. OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong previously issued an internal letter saying that 2024 is the first year of AI mobile phones. From the perspective of the development stage of the industry, AI mobile phones will also become the third stage of the mobile phone industry after feature phones and smartphonesHonor CEO Zhao Ming claimed at the Honor Magic6 Ultimate launch event that Magic was born for AI.

But the real AI mobile phone may depend on the competition between Apple and Huawei. If Apple does embed the Google Gemini model into the iPhone, as an improvement in the capabilities of Siri's functional line, it may be a huge change for the entire mobile phone industry.

This kind of application embedded in the system level as an underlying capability is completely different from the past iPhone with a Siri "artificial intelligence Q&A APP", it is through Google's deep coupling with the chip hardware AI capabilities, which can realize system-level modifications to the iPhone, and this permission has penetrated deep into Apple's bottom layer.

For AI phones, Apple is behind the collaboration with Google

In the past, Apple has always insisted on controlling the underlying basic permissions of its own closed ecosystem, and will never open such low-level system-level modification permissions to others, especially Google, the biggest rival in the field of operating systems. After all, in the eyes of the outside world, with Apple's R&D strength, it has the strength to take its own AI large model solution, so that it will not lead to the important core capabilities at the bottom being controlled by others.

But now Apple may not care so much. The first is that Apple has missed the outlet of AI large models, and there may be a gap with OpenAI GPT and other large models in terms of capabilities and layout of large models. Just last week, Apple's team produced a paper on multimodal pre-trained large models, and Apple's self-developed multi-modal pre-trained large model called MM1 appeared in this paper.

However, it can be seen from the test report of this paper by Apple's AI research team that Apple's MM1 is far behind OpenAI and Google's multimodal large models.

It is reported that Apple is also in contact with OpenAI, and at the same time negotiated with Google, and finally finalized Google. The reason is that the Google Gemini Nano (1.8 billion/3.25 billion parameter scale) itself is a large model designed for smart hardware such as mobile phones.

Google's model was also used by Samsung on the Galaxy S24, the flagship phone released at the beginning of the year. And the Chinese mobile phone army is developing its own large model. In particular, Huawei's Pangu model has put a lot of pressure on Apple.

However, it remains to be seen whether Apple will make such a risky decision, and one hidden danger if it does not take the self-developed route is that it may go to a product efficiency problem similar to the purchase of Intel chips in the past, and finally have to go back and redesign the product architecture through similar self-developed M1 chips.

Of course, we do not rule out that Apple's current use of Google's large model is just a delaying measure, and then wait until its own large model is polished and matured to achieve replacement, but now in the transition period, Apple does need to leverage Google to achieve a better experience.

Apple and Google, we can't ignore its importance, which means that Apple is undergoing a major change, especially the dare to give up the complete autonomy of the underlying authority of the system, which stems from the fact that Apple really sees the transformative significance of computing power to its own products, and Apple does not choose to develop its own and chooses to cooperate with Google, which means that Apple's requirements for computing power are very high. This cooperation is likely to be a major breakthrough in AI applications.

If the cooperation is successful, we can see products that subvert the mobile phone industry, and even see that computing power will change the way we live and the whole world, and AI mobile phones may once again drive a new round of smartphone market increment.

Epilogue:

"If I had to, I'd take my last breath and spend all the $40 billion Apple had in the bank, and I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product, even if it's going to start a nuclear war. This is a sentence that Steve Jobs once said when he was alive.

But from today's point of view, Apple's opponent is no longer Android, and Android's opponent is no longer iOS. Apple and Google, a pair of sworn rivals, shook hands and came together because of their common rivals, and even, Apple's mobile phone opened the underlying data permissions for Google's large model, breaking the closed ecological model of software and hardware integration that has always been adhered to.

This may mean that the war of smartphones has really reached an inflection point, and the mobile phone market may usher in real changes. In the AI mobile phone battlefield, Apple or Huawei's product performance is better, and whether Apple can rely on the AI model to bring truly amazing innovation and maintain its position in China's high-end mobile phone market, may be the biggest highlight of this year. The smartphone market is likely to change this year, and we'll see.

Author: Wang Xinxi, Senior Reviewer of TMT This article is not reproduced without permission