Huawei might have a way to avoid some of the worst consequences of tightening US trade restrictions, provided it’s willing to be patient. Financial Timessources claim Huawei is planning a dedicated chip factory in Shanghai that would make parts for its core telecom infrastructure business. It would be run by a partner, the city-backed Shanghai IC R&D Center, and would be considered experimental until it’s ready to make chips Huawei can use.
The plant would start by making chips based on a very old 45-nanometer process before moving to 28nm chips by late 2021. That would be advanced enough to make chips for smart TVs and Internet of Things devices, the tipsters said. It would reach 20nm by late 2022, when it could make “most” of its 5G cellular hardware.
Between this and a stockpile of chips, Huawei could theoretically keep its telecom hardware business running with relatively little disruption. While its chips from 2021 onward might lag behind international rivals, they could be good enough for the domestic market until Huawei can further improve its designs.
Huawei and the IC R&D Center both declined to comment to FT, with the research firm calling the matter “rather sensitive.”
Huawei might not have to worry about its long-term future if reports are accurate. As you may have noticed, though, there’s no mention of phones in this plan. Mobile devices need highly advanced chip processes to remain competitive at the high end (the Kirin 9000 in the Mate 40 Pro is a 5nm chip), and the reported Shanghai plans wouldn’t help. Huawei can turn to fabrication allies like SMIC for more modest phone chips, but it’s still likely to scale back its phone offerings once their existing supplies dry up.
Motorola has been on a tear this year: It has announced or released more than ten new smartphones in 2020, and rumor has it there's at least one more big reveal coming soon. For what it's worth though, the brand's latest mid-range offering the -- Motorola One 5G -- might be its most appealing new release yet. It's not a flagship in the vein of the Edge Plus, or the continuation of an experiment like the Razr. Instead, it's a sub-$500 smartphone running a mostly clean flavor of Android 10 with a handful of unexpected features and an enormous battery. In other words, it's exactly the kind of introduction to 5G that Motorola's cost-conscious fans probably need.
There's just one catch, though. Motorola promised earlier this year it would release a 5G smartphone for under $500, and, well, you're looking at it. For now, though, the company declined to say how much less than $500 the One 5G will cost -- the most Motorola would say is that the phone will wind up on AT&T soon, and that a Verizon-friendly model with support for mmWave 5G is set to land in October. In other words, stay tuned for official pricing.
Now, onto the phone itself. Many mid-range 5G smartphones use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765 and the Motorola One 5G is no exception -- it's paired here with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, though you can add microSD cards as large as 1TB. (A quick aside: We usually see this chipset in slightly more expensive phones, but Qualcomm apparently slashed its prices earlier this year.) While Motorola's choice of chipset isn't much of a surprise, the rest of the stuff around it is: The phone features, among other things, a whopper of a 6.7-inch Full HD+ screen complete with HDR10+ certification and a 90Hz refresh rate. That means this display is just as big and runs just as smoothly as Motorola's flagship Endless Edge display; here's hoping its tall, 21:9 aspect ratio means regular people have a chance of wrapping their hands around this thing.
Motorola
Powering the whole shebang is a 5,000mAh battery, which we're hoping to see multi-day use from since it's paired with a chipset that sips power rather than gulps it. Meanwhile, around back sits a quartet of cameras: You'll spend most of your time shooting with the main, 48-megapixel wide sensor, but it's flanked by a 2-megapixel depth sensor, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera with a 118-degree field of view and a curious 5-megapixel macro camera for extreme close-ups. Now, the jury is still out on whether people are really clamoring for this kind of highly specialized sensor, but Motorola gets credit for sweetening the deal in an unusual way -- it gave that macro camera a tiny, proper ring light. (And in case you were wondering, no, you cannot use it as a more appealing kind of flash for the other cameras.)
The front-facing camera situation is similarly surprising, since Motorola saw fit to add two of them here. The first is a relatively straightforward 16-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 aperture, and you can count on this one to deliver the stronger selfies. The other camera, meanwhile, is an 8-megapixel ultra-wide that Motorola says can squeeze an extra three or four people into the frame at once. Throw in a side-mounted fingerprint reader, a headphone jack and NFC for all those COVID-era contactless payments, and it feels like we're looking at a phone that could give Google's new, cheap Pixels a real fight in the looming 5G mid-range smartphone war.
Of course, there is too often a gap between a phone's potential on paper and its performance in the real world. Motorola is eyeing an imminent launch so, stay tuned to see how its unusually appealing new phone stacks up against the competition.
The KEY2 was the last great BlackBerry TCL made before it discontinued its relationship with the brand. Chris Velazco/Engadget
BlackBerry faithful were dealt a harsh blow earlier this year when TCL, the biggest company to build phones for the brand, said it would stop. That left enthusiasts clinging to their KEY2s, wondering about would-be replacements, and raising glasses to the good old days — at least until an upstart Texas outfit announced plans to pick up where TCL left off.
OnwardMobility was incorporated in Austin as Onward88 in late 2018 by CEO Peter Franklin, and the startup has spent the years since piecing together an executive team and a strategy for making BlackBerry phones relevant in a 5G age. The announcement of its licensing deal with BlackBerry and Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile this week was very much the company's coming-out party, but it also raised a handful of big questions: Who are these people? Is this a B2B play? What's the new BlackBerry going to cost? And perhaps biggest of all, is this going to be the BlackBerry that fans have longed for?
In a conversation with Engadget, Franklin was eager to address some of these questions. And even when he declined to provide specifics, he laid out an ambitious — and in some ways surprising — vision for the BlackBerry of the near future.
The original plan, according to Franklin, was to build the "the most secure phone out there." That's the sort of angle that opens doors, but doesn't usually translate to mass-market success. Over time, however, the team's priorities came to include productivity, as evidenced by the number of times the word plastered on the OnwardMobility website. For now, the specifics are still shrouded in secrecy; Franklin wouldn't elaborate on the new BlackBerry's features apart from noting that the phone will pack "tons of unique experiences" and "security propositions." Still, that newfound focus on getting things done helped widen the project's scope considerably.
While OnwardMobility is eager to push new hardware at business and government customers, Franklin has committed to building this new phone with normal consumers in mind. "The only way to be successful with government and enterprise is if consumers want to use it too," he said. "If your company makes you use this phone and you don't like it, that's not where we want to be."
But here's the thing: OnwardMobility's definition of a phone consumers want to use seems totally different from TCL's, or any of BlackBerry's earlier licensing partners. Franklin describes the device the company plans to ship in the first half of 2021 as a consumer-first "global flagship" (his words, not mine) with a "world-class camera" and support for both sub-6 and mmWave 5G networks. And then there's the keyboard. OnwardMobility confirmed in its press release that the new BlackBerry would indeed have a physical keyboard, but Franklin — a fan of the classic Bold 9900 — wouldn't elaborate much on the phone's design.
Of course, that might be because the design isn't set in stone. According to Franklin, the team is collaborating closely with its partner FIH Mobile and has strong opinions about the device it wants to make, but still craves feedback. "We want to hear from the users," he said.
With all that said, there is at least one aspect of BlackBerry production that Franklin seems especially adamant about. Security remains the biggest priority for OnwardMobility, and a big part of fully securing a smartphone in 2020 is securing its supply chain. That's an exceptionally tough feat when you consider the lion's share of the world's hardware production happens within Chinese borders. FIH Mobile, Onward's manufacturing partner, knows that all too well. While its parent company Foxconn is headquartered in Taiwan, most of its smartphone production happens across multiple factories in Shenzhen.
Not so for the BlackBerry: Franklin insists that the company's forthcoming phone will be manufactured completely outside of mainland China. If that pans out, the likeliest candidates would be FIH's facilities in Vietnam or India; the company has been boosting production capacity there as trade friction between the US and China continues to build. Producing a phone outside of China is one thing, but Franklin seems to be chasing an even more ambitious goal. "We want to be the most American-made phone out there," he said. "The specifics of that and how we're enabling that are to come."
Despite working with a Foxconn subsidiary, OnwardMobility CEO Peter Franklin says the new BlackBerry will be "manufactured outside of mainland China." Siu Chiu / reuters
For now, it's unclear if the team intends to use more components sourced from US companies, or if OnwardMobility plans to push FIH to manufacture these phones closer to home. (The closest FIH production facility to the United States is in Chihuahua, Mexico, less than 250 miles from the US board. Parent company Foxconn also owns a massive plant in Wisconsin, though it's largely geared toward manufacturing LCD panels and components for servers.) Perhaps the final plan involves a bit of both, or neither; all Franklin will say for now is to stay tuned.
The idea of a mostly "American-made" phone will help Onward curry favor with the government and businesses hardening their infrastructures, but it's difficult not to imagine some kind of impact on the BlackBerry's price tag. Franklin repeatedly stressed that, while some trade-offs had to be made, he's proud of the direction the Onward team has settled on and that the device will be priced "competitively" for the market. "We want our features in as many of our fans' hands as possible," he said. "Price is a huge part of that." It should be noted, though, that Franklin declined to clarify if he meant competitive for the market at large, or competitive by flagship standards.
Either way, BlackBerry fans might be able to snag a deal through their wireless service provider. Like TCL before it, OnwardMobility plans to pitch this phone at people with the help of the nation's wireless carriers. Franklin confirmed that conversations are already in progress, but declined to say who with.
We can, however, make some educated guesses. It wouldn't be a huge leap to think that Verizon — currently the only carrier in the US with a mmWave network — is one such partner. (Verizon is Engadget’s parent company, but had no input into this story.) Franklin's background is largely in software and includes stints at Microsoft and Zynga, but a notable chunk of OnwardMobility's executive team previously worked at Sonim, a maker of rugged smartphones whose devices are often sold by Verizon and AT&T. And Pam Norris, who serves as Onward's SVP of product, had considerable experience working alongside AT&T. Her tenure at Huawei Device USA saw her "define product specifications and feature alignment" with AT&T's rigorous requirements until the carrier torpedoed its relationship with the Chinese phone maker just before CES 2018.
While our conversation left me with as many new questions as answers, it's still early days for OnwardMobility, and Franklin plans to hash out of a lot of the details in public. (The publicity push has already started: He guested on a special episode of the CrackBerry podcast the other day.) Only one day out of the gate, and OnwardMobility has managed to pull off a major feat: It got the BlackBerry community fired up again. But now the real work starts. It needs to build a phone to impress them, wireless carriers, businesses and government, and you.
It looks like BlackBerry hardware is back from the brink of extinction once again. Today, the security startup OnwardMobility announced plans to release a new 5G BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard. It could arrive in North America and Europe as soon as the first half of 2021.
This may sound familiar. A few years ago, BlackBerry seemed to be a thing of the past. Then, TCL agreed to manufacture two BlackBerry-branded phones. In February, TCL decided not to renew the deal with BlackBerry, and this month, it stopped selling the devices. Thanks to OnwardMobility, BlackBerry may get one more chance.
OnwardMobility CEO Peter Franklin says the newest Blackberry will be both sleek and secure. The company plans to work closely with BlackBerry and FIH Mobile Limited, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group.
“BlackBerry is thrilled OnwardMobility will deliver a BlackBerry 5G smartphone device with physical keyboard leveraging our high standards of trust and security synonymous with our brand,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement.
It seems like licensing deals are the only way to get new BlackBerry devices. The last deal BlackBerry struck with a hardware maker was in 2016 to release phones in India. TCL was easily BlackBerry’s best shot, to date, at a comeback.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has found some striking oddities in the planet’s atmosphere, including exotic lightning and slushy hail “mushballs.”. Juno spotted an unusual form of lightning which is formed not from water clouds, like lightning is here on Earth, but from an ammonia-water solution. This “shallow lightning” sparks through Jupiter’s atmosphere, creating flashes which were captured by Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit camera.
HTC manufactured the first Android phones, working closely with Google and carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon. However, the company’s fortunes took a downturn in the face of competition from Samsung and numerous Chinese smartphone makers. HTC has been losing money consistently since 2015, but it just announced the U20 5G and Desire 20 Pro, its first new phones in a year. This might not get HTC back to the upper echelons of the smartphone market, but at least it’s trying.
HTC is currently living off of the $1.1 billion it got from Google for handing over its Pixel engineering division. Its revenues have consistently dropped by about 50 percent year-over-year in each quarter, and it lost more than $60 million in the first quarter of 2020. That Google money will keep it chugging along for a while, but there isn’t much hope on the horizon. The smartphone market is extremely crowded, and HTC is no longer a well-known brand. Meanwhile, the virtual reality market is growing more slowly than HTC’s Vive division had hoped.
Understandably, HTC is playing it safe in 2020. Both of HTC’s new devices will launch in its home country of Taiwan, with availability in other regions following at a later date. The U20 5G is HTC’s first 5G phone, but it doesn’t have the spendy Snapdragon 865. This is a Snapdragon 765 phone, which is a bit less powerful than the 865. Although, it has an integrated 5G modem that should be better for battery life than the 865’s separate modem.
The U20 5G is a mid-range device, priced at NT$18,990 (about $640). In addition to the 765 SoC, this device has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage (with microSD slot), a 5,000mAh battery, USB-C, and no headphone jack. It sports a 6.8-inch 1080p LCD with a punch-hole selfie camera and a rather large chin at the bottom. While the Snapdragon 765 can support millimeter-wave 5G (at slower speeds than the 865), the U20 5G doesn’t have the necessary antennas. This phone will work only on sub-6 5G, which is more common than millimeter-wave.
The Desire 20 Pro is a bit smaller and explicitly a midrange phone. It will cost NT$8,990 (about $304) with a Snapdragon 665, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage (with microSD slot), a 6.5-inch 1080p LCD, and a 5,000mAh battery. Like the U20, this phone has a hole-punch camera and large bezel at the bottom of the device. There’s also no 5G support. HTC is also launching this phone in Taiwan with an international launch possible in the coming months.
