Huawei sort of owns up to P10, Mate 9 storage tech debacle
As fast as smartphones might be, the one part of them that is relatively slow is the internal data storage. Most smartphones still use the old eMMC type storage, considered one of the slowest. A few OEMs now use the faster UFS storage, which some companies have used as a bragging right. One such company is Huawei, who has been advertising the fast storage tech on its Huawei P10 and even Huawei Mate 9 flagships. That is, until it was caught actually using the older eMMC on some models.
Both recent Huawei flagships were advertised to use the latest UFS 2.0 standard, which puts it on par with Samsung's latest models. User testing, however, revealed that it isn't actually universally true. Benchmarks and tests proved that there are some models that seem to be using the slower eMMC. Huawei surprisingly acknowledged this but its response is perplexing and disappointing at the same time.
Yes, there are models using eMMC and Huawei is blaming on the industry-wide shortage of UFS chips, which is really the case. If Huawei had stopped there, however, it might have been fine. Huawei mobile head Richard Yu, however, followed this app with a remark claiming that users shouldn't really notice any difference because of software optimizations.
Unsurprisingly, owners were up in arms, providing proof that such isn't really the case. Others even argued that Huawei was committing something akin to fraud, advertising and actually charging for a feature that may not be there. Its flip-flopping on the same feature for the Huawei Mate 9 also shows some uncertainty from the company.
For his part, Yu made public a letter addressed to the company's staff, citing the incident to be a wake-up call for him. He admits having responded to consumers' complaints in an arrogant way and is setting up a customer listening taskforce to prevent it from happening again. He doesn't address, however, the actual issue of smartphones with a cheaper piece of hardware selling at the same premium price.