IS CHINESE PHONE TAKING OVER THE UNIVERSE?

If you saw Huawei’s charismatic CEO on stage in Paris this week, unveiling a premium-looking LTE phone, you’ll have been left in no doubt as to the scale of the man’s ambition. No matter how much American intelligence committees like to defame his company, Richard Yu refuses to be taken any less seriously on the world stage than Apple or Samsung, paying for splashy launch events from a $300 million total marketing budget.
Now, I’ve only spent a couple of days with the new Ascend P7 handset, but I’d say there’s risk that Huawei is starting to believe its own rhetoric before it has even had a chance to come true.
For a start, the Chinese manufacturer has somehow forgotten that it needs to undercut rival products if it’s going to entice consumers to switch to a less well-known brand. The P7 is priced at 440 euros ($620 in a raw dollar conversion), making it significantly more expensive than the LG-built Nexus 5, which — thanks to Google's GOOGL +1.18% deliberate indifference towards making a profit — costs just 350 euros (or $350 in the States). But more to the point, even you were able to import the P7 from Asia at a much lower price, the Nexus 5 would still be a much better phone.
Okay, the Ascend P7 has a lovely glass-and-metal build, an usually high-res front-facing camera and ultra-skinny bezels that make the phone feel tiny despite its 5-inch 1080p display. However, it possesses an in-house “Kirin 910″ processor that can sometimes be temperamental: it’s okay for daily use, and it excels at basic gaming, but it struggles badly when pushed to the limit — just try to play Android’s big new strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and you’ll see what I mean. By contrast, the aging Nexus 5 still boasts an excellent processor, the Snapdragon 800, which rarely gets flustered.
And whereas the Nexus 5 runs clean Android, the P7 suffers from having Huawei’s own, clunky software skin (excuse me, “Emotion UI”) plastered over the top. This interface tries to offer a simpler option for new smartphone users, for example by scrapping the app drawer and displaying all apps on the home screen(s) instead, but I think it’ll ultimately hold these customers back and cause them frustration. For Android veterans, meanwhile, the combination of the slap-dash software and the scarily iPhone 4-like hardware design may actually make them feel like they’re carrying some sort of naughty Chinese knock-off. (Definitely a situation that calls for a replacement skin, like Nova Launcher, to be installed at the earliest opportunity).
These are two fundamental, product-based reasons to avoid the Ascend P7, before you even get to the deeper questions of whether Western consumers will be swayed by the bad publicity over Huawei’s alleged (and unproven) links to the Chinese Communist Party, or whether Huawei is being unfairly prevented from establishing a foothold in America (where the P7 won’t even by available, except as a haphazard import).
It’s a shame, really, because Huawei is part of a confident cluster of Chinese companies (including MediaTek, Oppo and of course Motorola’s new owner, Lenovo) that genuinely are able to offer better value to Western consumers, without the need for American or Korean middle-men, so long as they can get their products and pricing just right.