BEIJING, March 24 (TMTPOST)— At the first mobile event this year, Huawei Technologies Co. launched dual series as its flagship to shore up its position in the market.

Huawei P60 Art Image from Huawei

The P60 series, including the base P60, and two premium versions P60 Pro and P60 Art, are equipped with the quad-curve LTPO screen, delivering a smooth grip and immersive view with its 1-120 Hz adaptive refresh rate and reducing the power consumption by 29%. With the HUAWEI X-TRUETM Display, P60 became the first mobile to obtain the dual certification of professional color accuracy by TUV Rheinland. All the series adopt Kunlun Glass for protection and IP68 water and dust resistance. They have the massive camera delivering 48-megapixel with an adjustable aperture of F1.4-F4.0, the first super-spotting main camera in the industry. The P60 Pro boasts the world’s first super-large aperture of f/2.1, thus emerging as the first flagship phone packed with such a large sensor for the periscope camera. P60 Art has an upgraded 40MP ultral-wide camera and a 5100mAh battery, with more storage capacity than the 4,815mAh battery packs that P60 base and Pro have.

About half a year ago, Huawei officially applied the Beidou satellite technology, a high-orbit satellite with a distance of up to 36,000 kilometers, to mobile phones when it rollout out Mate 50 series. The recent event on Thursday witnessed the Chinese tech giant to upgrade the tech. The second generation of satellite communication allows both P60 series and the fordable Mate X3 series to offer two-way SMS, which enables users to not only receive but also send an SMS through satellite. Mate X3 also has a new feature called Lingxi Communication, which taps the potential through antenna design, device-edge-cloud collaboration and algorithm upgrades to ensure a quality signal and smooth communication all the way.  

It is notable that Huawei also works on the artificial intelligence (AI) application to boost its mobile. The P60 series will have a new feature for image search in May. The feature, based on the multi-modal large language model (LLM), will allow any mobile users to find matching pictures recorded in the phone gallery via Huawei’s voice assistant Xiaoyi. Such application, as the first ever in the mobile industry, seems to adopt similar tech as that empowers ChatGPT, one of the most popular generative AI chatbots, according to Yu Chengdong, or Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group.

P60 and P60 Pro will cost you from RMB4,488 (US$657) to RMB7,988 and are set to be released on March 30. P60 Art will go on sale on April 7 with the starting price of RMB8,988. MateX3’s prices range from RMB12,999 to RMB15,999. Both of these series are powered by Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, with no support for a 5G network.

The new launch came as rumor about Huawei’s pushing back its mobile phone business spread. In the beginning of this month, the telecom company was said to consider a split-up of its consumer business, probably resulting in investment in mobile reduced this year if the business is sold off, and some of relevant R&D teams may merge with Honor, a former Huawei smartphone brand that was spun off due to the U.S. sanctions in2020. This is false news since Huawei will still ramp up input in mobile and keep building its premium brand, an insider told 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese business newspaper. The person added that the company would launch new flagship mobile this month.