Huawei phones

Huawei, or in full Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese company focused on telecommunications and consumer electronics. It is one of the largest phone manufacturers in the world.

Pronunciation Huawei

There is some confusion about how to pronounce Huawei. Despite it being very common here to say "hu-ah-waai" the official pronunciation is "wha-weeh." The company made a handsome attempt in 2012 with an advertising campaign to get the public to say the official name. It had little effect and in Dutch-language advertisements it now uses "hu-ah-waai" as well.

Huawei series

Huawei uses the Android platform for its phones and places them in several series. The two main ones are the P series consisting of flagships with a beautiful design and the Mate series consisting mainly of more powerful and larger flagships. The entire lineup consists or consisted of the following series;

• Mate - Large high-end flagships with the latest technology
• P - High-end flagships focused on design
• nova - For youthful audiences and focused on gaming
• Y - Cheap entry-level flagships

The company used the name "Ascend" from 2012 to 2015 but stepped away from it because it added little. It also discontinued the G and W series, the former of which consisted of mid-range and the latter of Windows Phone models.

EMUI

Huawei's smartphones run on Google's Android operating system with EMUI on top. That is a so-called skin with different layout and additional features. EMUI stands for Emotion UI and is updated every year by Huawei.

Unlike standard Android and many other Android user interfaces, EMUI does not have over separate app menu, the so-called app drawer. This makes it more similar to iOS that Apple uses on its iPhones. Since EMUI 5, however, there is an option to enable this as well. To do so, look for Home Screen Style > Drawer.

Honor

In addition to releasing phones under its own name, it also releases models under the Honor name. This is a sub-brand aimed at a young audience whose models have a relatively low price. Huawei manages to get that price so low by keeping most of its sales in-house. Getting rid of the middleman results in a lower price. That has the disadvantage that Honor phones (especially in the beginning) were sometimes hard to come by.

Spying

Huawei is often accused of spying on Western countries. Led by the U.S., many other countries refrained from engaging Huawei to roll out 5G networks because of concerns about eavesdropping. Real concrete evidence of this has not (yet) been provided by the US. However, the incident with T-Mobile's Tappy is often mentioned. That was a robotic arm with a finger that T-Mobile deployed to test new smartphones. After a Tappy arm was stolen by Huawei employees, an exact copy was recreated. The two companies struck a deal in 2017 that averted a lawsuit.

Dream It Possible

Anyone who has ever watched a Huawei product launch will have heard it; Huawei's anthem: Dream It Possible. The song sung by singer Delacey has achieved a bit of a cult status because of its melodramatic tones and tear-jerking music video.

Since we hear the song less and less often during keynotes, we included it above. We're fans, hopefully you are too.