Huawei Releases Mate 70 Range To Challenge Apple

Huawei on Tuesday released its latest flagship smartphone line, the Mate 70 range, as well as the Mate X6 foldable and the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 2025 tablet, saying all three devices would support cross-device file-transfers using AI-powered gestures.

Company executives demonstrated using “grab and release” gestures to transfer content from one device to another.

The feature is similar to Apple’s AirDrop, which enables users to send and receive pictures, videos, documents and other files wirelessly to nearby Apple devices.

The Huawei features are powered by an AI motion sensor and use a feature called HOTA (Huawei-Over-the-Air), the company said.

AI features

Following a pre-order period that began on 18 November, Huawei’s online store showed that more than 3 million people had signed up for pre-orders of the Mate 70, Mate 70 Pro and Mate 70 Pro+ models ahead of the launch.

The pre-orders signal an intent to buy and do not require a deposit, but indicate the popularity of Huawei’s devices since the company returned to the 5G handset market with last year’s Mate 60 range.

The Mate 60 devices surprised observers with their inclusion of a domestically manufactured 5G chip, in spite of US sanctions intended to ensure Huawei and its manufacturing partner SMIC did not have access to the technologies required to make such chips.

The 5G chip and accompanying Kirin processor were likely to have been manufactured using less advanced tools that were adapted to use a 7 nanometre process, at the expense of a relatively low yield rate, making the process expensive, analysts said.

Huawei’s success has helped to drive Apple’s sales in China down by 7.7 percent over the 12 months through September.

Huawei’s third-quarter smartphone shipments in the Chinese mainland market rose 42 percent year-on-year to account for 15.3 percent of the market, behind Vivo and Apple, IDC said last month.

HarmonyOS Next

The Mate 70 series comes as Huawei calls on more developers to support its HarmonyOS Next platform, a domestically developed operating system that removes compatibility with Android.

The Android-compatible version of HarmonyOS was introduced in 2019 after Huawei was placed on the US Entity List blacklist, prohibiting it from using Google’s Android and accompanying services.

Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu Zhijun, said on Saturday that reaching the 100,000 mark for HarmonyOS Next applications would be a “symbol of maturity” for the platform, one the company expected to reach in six months to a year.

The platform had more than 15,000 native apps as of 22 October, including the most frequently used 5,000 apps, making the ecosystem “basically usable”, Xu said.