> Huawei is a brand known for its great tech innovations.
Pardon me while I wipe the coffee spray off my screen.
A whole lot of phone makers' dev teams just shouted in glee and gave each other fist bumps that Huawei is likely taking an expensive and doomed-to-failure detour.
iirc Huawei shipped one of the first mainstream folding phones at a time when their only competition was Samsung and they both released them around the same time.
Huawei also did fancy stuff with their cameras during their partnership with Leica and they even started the trend of putting periscope zoom lenses in phones if I'm not mistaken.
Their SoC Kirin 970 had the first NPU when all other vendors didn't yet ship any neural acceleration in hardware.
Sure, they're probably stealing from the competition, but so does everyone else.
They're also doing remarkable stuff with modern mobile SoCs despite Western sanctions.
My guess though is that it's all just a show. I really doubt that other companies are incapable of producing devices like that. They just don't launch them because they're probably not viable one way or another (quality control, demand, ROI, etc).
And yeah they're definitely stealing. Huawei has been caught pretty blatantly doing so.
They're kinda the only game in town in China. Which translates to they can dictate what language chinese developers code in and lock out any potential non Huawei hardware while they sit on a monopoly.
Not sure if it meets your criteria for "innovative" (the word has become practically meaningless anyways), but the HarmonyOS [1] project is very interesting. Microkernel-based OS that runs across laptops, tablets, smartphones and IoT devices. It's great that we're finally getting a true competitor to the iOS and Android duopoly in the mobile space.
1. Huawei was the largest contributor to 5G development.
2. The P20 Pro significantly advanced the state of the art in phone cameras. It was hands-down the best phone camera available at the time. Unfortunately, soon after that phone came out, the US started sanctioning Huawei in basically every conceivable way, which made them go from market leader in Europe to basically nonexistent in the West.
Pardon me while I wipe the coffee spray off my screen.
A whole lot of phone makers' dev teams just shouted in glee and gave each other fist bumps that Huawei is likely taking an expensive and doomed-to-failure detour.