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Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone comes with HarmonyOS but doesn’t support 5G due to US sanctions
- US sanctions that began under former US President Donald Trump have taken their toll
- The Shenzhen-based giant is quickly losing relevance in the mobile phone market
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Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co's latest flagship smartphone does not support 5G connections, as the company continues to lose relevance in the mobile phone market amid Washington’s ban on its access to US technologies.
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The P50 and P50 Pro, the company’s newest top-tier phones, will not support 5G, said Richard Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, during a virtual launch event on Thursday evening.
“US sanctions over the past two years have limited our development of 5G smartphones,” Yu said. “We can only use 5G chips to provide 4G functionality.”
Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 4G chip, the P50 will be available for purchase from September in China starting at 4,488 yuan (US$695). The versions of the P50 Pro with 256 and 512 gigabytes of storage will feature the in-house designed 5-nm Kirin 9000 5G chip and be available starting in early August, according to Yu.
Both models will be the first smartphones to ship with the company’s own HarmonyOS 2, an alternative to Google’s Android mobile platform. Huawei said over 40 million people have updated their smartphones to the new operating system since its launch in June.
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The launch of the P50 and P50 Pro comes months after Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei called for accelerating the company’s pivot to software and diversifying its sources of revenue to survive the scourge of the US trade bans.
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