Huawei says its latest flagship smartphones lack 5G, blames US sanctions The Register

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Huawei officially announced its latest flagship smartphones on Thursday, both lacking 5G capabilities due to ongoing US sanctions.

The P50 and P50 Pro handsets peak at 4G / LTE, which puts them behind rival high-end devices.

They also both run Huaweis HarmonyOS 2, which is the open source Linux kernel and Android kernel wrapped in Huawei’s proprietary software and mobile app store. Although this operating system runs Android apps, it does not come with the proprietary suite of Google Play, Gmail, etc.

This is all because under the previous White House administration, the US government’s Commerce Department placed Huawei and dozens of its subsidiaries and affiliates on a so-called entity list, which made it difficult, if not impossible. , for US organizations to do business with the Chinese mega-body. These organizations need special permission from Uncle Sam, which is rarely granted.

As a result of that crackdown, Huawei found itself unable to bundle Google’s closed-source Android components for the P50 and P50 Pro, and so it ended up with its in-house HarmonyOS, which it launched in 2019.

Huawei also had to settle for a 4G variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 system-on-chip in handsets; Normally, the Arm Cortex based octa-core processor comes with 5G connectivity. Rumored to be the SM8325 is the part number of the 4G 888 and the 5G is the SM8350.

We are told that Qualcomm has permission to supply a 4G version of its Snapdragon 888, but not a 5G version, under US sanctions. “Qualcomm has a license for a number of 4G products [to sell Huawei], but we can’t comment beyond that, ”a Qualcomm spokesperson confirmed to The Register.

There’s a P50 Pro variant that uses Huawei’s Arm-compatible Kirin 9000 system-on-a-chip, although the device doesn’t support 5G either.

“Due to US sanctions, our new smartphones cannot work with 5G wireless connections, although we are surely the world leader in 5G technology,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Electronics Group. , at the launch, Nikkei Asia first reported. “But with 4G connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, and our AI compute algorithms, we can still deliver performance as powerful as any 5G phone.”

Yu said the Kirin 9000-powered P50 Pro will be available on August 12 for 7,488 yuan ($ 1,152); the one with the 4G version of the Snapdragon 888 should arrive shortly thereafter. The P50 model, only available with the Snapdragon 888 4G chip, will be available in September.

The P50 has 8 GB of RAM and 128 or 256 BG of storage space. The P50 Pro can go up to 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM.

Huawei was not immediately available for comment. We will update the story if we hear from the biz.

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