Earlier this year, Huawei took the wraps off its latest flagship smartphones — Mate 9 (the first phone with Amazon’s Alexa integration) and P10. These high-end devices come packed with impressive internal specs and features to battle against the likes of Apple’s iPhone.
But, the leading Chinese hardware maker has recently been facing the wrath of its consumers. It is because they are accusing Huawei of ‘cutting corners’ in the internal specifications of its P10 device because of a shortage of supplies. The company has come under for its comment on employing a mixture of less advanced and powerful chips into their latest devices. It had stumbled across issues with the memory chip specifications in its other premium smartphone — Mate 9, reports Reuters.
Huawei’s mobile chief Richard Yu had himself acknowledged that the company was integrating — less efficient eMMC flash memory cards and high-performance Universal Flash Storage (UFS) cards in its P10 flagship device. This (questionable) step, he mentioned, was being undertaken due to ‘severe shortage’ in their supply chain. But, he attempted to convince users that the mobile experience wouldn’t exactly be hampered due to the adjustments being introduced internally.
But the owners of the smartphone, not the company has the last say on the product performance. The adjustments made to the P10 didn’t sit well with most consumers and they’ve been relaying their angst against Huawei on online forums. They’re citing numerous speed results, which show varying performance specifics, to counter the company’s word on the same.
This fire was further fanned when users discovered that the Chinese phone maker had pulled the description of an important feature of the Mate 9 from its website. The said device was debuted at CES 2017 earlier this year, with a stand-out specification for the device being the UFS that was pronounced to be 100 percent faster than a typical eMMC flash.
The removal of UFS description, coupled with the removal of the third-party speed test and benchmarking app — Androbench from the Huawei app store is making the users more anxious about the internals of their phones. They were irked by the negligent attitude of the Chinese company towards the consumers, such that they’ve started selling sub-standard phones in the name of flagships.
With regards to the same, The Shenzhen Consumer Council announced on China’s Twitter clone Weibo that it has received over 32 complaints from users on the issue. But, this didn’t stop the consumers from airing their opinion on social media. One of the users writes:
How dare you cut corners on such an expensive flagship! Conceal the differences at first and then say the differences don’t matter once busted.
In an internal letter circulated among the staffers, later posted on Weibo, stated that the overblowing controversy over the Huawei P10 and Mate 9’s internal memory specs and performance was a definite ‘wake-up call’ for them. Richar Yu, Huawei’s mobile chief, acknowledged that he had hastily reacted ‘in an arrogant way’ the last time around. The company hasn’t decided on the next plan of action as of yet, but is setting up a ‘customer listening taskforce’ to take a series of actions to resolve the situation. There is currently no word on compensation or global product recall as of yet.
There is no surprise in the fact that Huawei is being faced with a shortage of silicon chips to integrate into their devices. This is one of the most prominent problems that global smartphone makers are currently staring right in the face. Due to the same, we had received reports that Samsung was hogging the entire supply of Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 835 processor. And that LG had to resort to the previous-generation, less powerful Snapdragon 821 to power its latest flagship — LG G6. Further, the chipmakers have already warned phone makers of the continued shortage and tight supply of silicon chips in the market through this year.
