The new Huawei Mate 20 Lite, due to be launched in South Africa this week, is a 6.3-inch handset that will probably sell for half the price of the iPhone XS Max. Its big brother, the Mate 20, will be launched in London later this month, in direct competition with the Apple and Samsung flagships.
LG, which made a spectacular return to smartphone technology leadership last year with the V20+, has also entered the fray, although with a more modest 6.1-inch device, the G7 ThinQ.
A standout feature of this handset is its narrow form factor. It is quite astonishing that so much screen space can be forced out of a phone that can be controlled with one had – the one-time “advantage” that Apple claimed its 4-inch handsets had over the Samsung 5.3” giants.
The phone once again claims technology leadership for LG, in both audio technology and artificial intelligence (AI).
AI Cam automatically identifies the scene or subject, and sets one of more than a dozen colour and contrast filters, ranging from people and pets to food and flowers. It is claimed to identify more than a thousand different objects, and produces a word cloud in the field of view to allow tagging of photos. However, the human eye still does a somewhat better job in this regard.
The phone is the most advanced on the market in terms of voice command functionality, using what LG calls Super Far Field microphones to pick up voice commands from a greater distance than most other phones. AI is roped in again, enabling advanced “beam forming”, which essentially focuses sound input and filters out noise.
This brings the LG into the same frame as smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. The other big new phones also have their own voice assistants, although not quite as advanced.
These phones also all share one other significant feature: large batteries. Displays are the biggest drain on their power, so it is expected that the batteries also have to take up more space on the inside of the device. From 3000 mAh on the ThinQ and 3174 mAh on the XS Max to 3750 mAh on the Mate 20 Lite and 4000 mAh on the Note9, the batteries are intended merely to keep pace with screen size. However, careful power management will turn them into tools for productivity throughout a working day.
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee and on YouTube
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