Huawei’s smartphone pre-installed with its native ecosystem, Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), has finally launched in the South African market.
This after the company alluded to an imminent launch at a media briefing last month.
The newly-launched Huawei Y7p becomes the Chinese telecoms giant’s first smartphone in SA to run off the new ecosystem.
Huawei, which has enjoyed global smartphone growth in the recent past, quickly had to make way for its own ecosystem amid restrictions imposed by the US on Google's trade with the telco last May.
The US Department of Commerce put Huawei on an export blacklist, citing “national security threats” due to the company’s close ties to the Chinese government. Huawei has vehemently denied installing any backdoors in its networking equipment for alleged government spying.
HMS is Huawei’s effort to create an ecosystem of applications, application programming interfaces and cloud services, with the Android-based EMUI used as the device interface.
Last month, the company revealed the Huawei Mate 40 series and Huawei P40 series, which launches globally on 26 March, will also run on the new ecosystem.
Apart from running on the HMS ecosystem, the Huawei Y7p features EMUI 9.1 for the user interface, a 6.39-inch touchscreen display, with a resolution of 720x1 560 pixels and a 48MP triple camera. It is powered by a 1.7GHz octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 710F processor and comes with 4GB of RAM.
In a statement, the company says: “Android lovers can rest assured that the operating system they prefer on their smartphones is still the operating system that will be used for new Huawei phones that run off HMS.
“Huawei has also always optimised Android’s features for their latest EMUI updates, before Google adopted it for themselves. This includes performance optimisation of background app management by using AI [artificial intelligence], machine learning and intelligent resource scheduling; EROFS, which improves performance and compresses storage capacity; and Vulkan Graphics API, which provides high-quality and high-performance 3D graphics for apps.
“Because Android is open source, these enhancements that Huawei has developed have obviously been available to the entire tech community, contributing to further innovation. Huawei remains committed to developing the Android OS, and all its future smartphones in the near future will run off Android.”
According to the company, the Huawei App Gallery will still give South African users access to all the apps they need in their lives.
Huawei says ways to access local apps include copying most commonly used apps from the old device and downloading some of the apps directly from the Huawei App Gallery.
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