Huawei rules out 4k smartphone displays over battery life fears

If you’re looking for the next-generation display in your next Huawei smartphone, you may be disappointed as the Chinese manufacturer as advanced displays come with a battery life compromise that the company isn’t willing to accept. FoneArena spoke to Kevin Ho, President of the Handset Product Line at Huawei, in a special briefing at Huawei’s Shanghai campus where he explained the trade-off the company is facing with adopting next-generation displays.

“On the large screen 4k is very good but on a smaller smartphone display of five to six inches, maybe our eyes cannot tell the difference between this and 2k.”

“4k needs a lot of power, so if you use it you have to make compromises. A 4k display on a smartphone may give you half a day of battery life but a 2k display can give you maybe one day or more.”

“4k has four times the pixels of Full HD so the power consumption is maybe 4 or 8 times as much as Full HD so the smartphone has to have compromises with battery life.”

That being said however, Huawei isn’t ruling out the possibility of 4k devices in the future as it acknowledges it will provide the best possible experience and often finds way to solve complex problems. Kevin Ho added:

I don’t want to say there’s no chance for 4k on smartphones, but we need to think about compromise and whether our eyes can tell the difference.

In a later interview, Bruce Lee, VP of the Mate series Handset Product Line shared that the company had a few issues with the design of the Mate 7 and pushed the boundaries of their capabilities to find a solution.

Always find a solution

He revealed that during the design stages of the Ascend Mate 7, the marketing team wanted to reduce the battery capacity of the Mate 7 from 4100 mAh to 3700 mAh to improve the overall experience of the handset. In the R&D stages, the idea of a smaller battery and better handset appeal was pitched to Bruce Lee and following discussions and negotiations about the effect on battery life, the company ended with the current design of the Mate 7 and the larger battery capacity by redesigning the rest of the handset.

Rather than launch a product with just a few hours less battery life – and the Mate 7 has outstanding battery life so a few hours wouldn’t have been too much of a drawback – the company insisted on its policy of no compromise and pushed the launched back by a month in search of the perfect experience. The result was a handset that ticks a lot of boxes – read our full Ascend Mate 7 review for more info – and if Huawei apply the same approach to 4k devices, it’s likely the final device will tick all the boxes and offer excellent battery life.

Huawei is currently working on new battery technology but this is still a few years away from mass production and a roll out on its consumer devices. We asked for more info but the company declined to comment at this time.