The fast-growing Chinese handset maker unveils a cutting-edge but competitively priced smartphone with advanced photo and video features.
Ever since Huawei fell victim to US technology sanctions in mid-2019, its fortunes in the worldwide smartphone market compared to Chinese rival Xiaomi have been a near-mirror image: during 2020, Huawei shipments fell by 21.5% year-on-year, while Xiaomi rose by 17.6%. In Q4 2020, Xiaomi was number three with 43.3 million phones shipped (11.2% market share,32% YoY growth), while Huawei dropped to fourth place with 32.2m (8.4% share, -42.4% growth). Nowadays, new Xiaomi phones are eagerly awaited, while reviews of Huawei handsets such as the Mate 40 Pro come with regretful caveats about the absence of Google Mobile Services. Xiaomi’s new flagship Mi 11 is a proper ‘first’, marking the debut of Qualcomm’s top-end 5nm Snapdragon 888 5G Mobile Platform, which offers significant improvements in performance per watt, AI acceleration,5G support, computational photography, gaming performance, wi-fi speed and photo security.
