Huawei system upgrade gives Apple a run for its money

Huawei Technologies’ operating system covers 340 million users in 216 countries and regions, and it will be upgraded to cover even more existing consumers, Huawei said during the CES Asia which closed Friday.

Users' experience of Huawei’s latest EMUI 8.0 system is now “slightly better” than Apple’s iOS system, with an update on AI and graphic optimization, said Wang Chenglu, president of software engineering for Huawei's consumer business group.

“System optimization has always been a weakness for all Android phones," Wang said during a tech workshop at the CES Asia show. "Now Huawei has changed that."

Huawei is now the world’s No. 3 smartphone vendor, and it's expected to sell 200 million smartphones in 2018. It will surpass Apple to become the world’s No. 2 in 2019, the company said previously.

Huawei plans to update the new system with GPU Turbo technology for consumers with previous models, including Mate, P, Nova and Honor models within several months. The new EMUI 8.0 will cover 80 million existing users in the future, compared with 35 million now, according to Wang. 

Huawei has invested heavily in research and development, with domestic labs in Shenzhen and Shanghai as well as overseas centers in the United States, Russia and Europe.

The new system features an open platform on AI or artificial intelligence, which supports popular AI architecture like Tensorflow and Caffe2.

GPU Turbo will improve gaming and video performance by up to 60 percent, giving a boost to the development of AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and 3D, according to Huawei.