Xiaomi and Huawei’s war means better cheap phones for everyone

If you thought the battle for high-end phones was brutal, wait until you see what’s happening at the low-end sector.

Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun’s message to Huawei sums it up quite well: “Don’t mind life and death, come at us if you can.”

He flashed the message on screen during a launch event for a Redmi phone yesterday. It’s the first phone launched since Xiaomi spun Redmi off as a separate brand to focus on cheaper phones – aiming directly at Honor, a sub-brand of Huawei.

Lei Jun claims they’re the real leader in value-for-money phones, and claims Honor just picks fights. “We don’t start wars, but we’re not afraid of wars,” he said.

The good news is that, aside from entertaining quotes, Xiaomi offers plenty of cheap phones with pretty decent specifications – and they could be available in the US.

The new phone that the company introduced, the Redmi Note 7, has a 48MP rear camera and a mid-range Snapdragon 660 chipset for just US$145. The Honor 10 Lite, dissed by Lei Jun at the event, costs just over US$200 but comes with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a selfie camera that even the Lei Jun conceded was better than the one on the Redmi Note 7.

While neither handset is available in the US yet, both Redmi and Honor do sell handsets officially on Amazon. So there’s hope that they could soon be available to consumers there.

Redmi Note 7 and Honor 10 Lite both have the “water droplet” notch. / Photo credit: Redmi and Honor

While Redmi appears to be an answer to Honor, the funny thing is that Honor was an answer to Xiaomi itself. Huawei created Honor to take on Xiaomi in the budget phone market. And it worked: in the third quarter of 2018, Honor sold more phones in China than Xiaomi, which placed fourth.

It could be the overall situation, but Lei Jun’s outburst may have also been triggered by an Honor executive’s Zhihu post. Earlier this week, Honor’s Xiong Junmin posted an article explaining how the only real 48MP camera uses the Sony IMX 586 sensor, hinting that the Redmi Note 7, which uses the Samsung GM1 sensor, is not a real 48MP camera.

“If you provoke me one day, I’ll educate you the many technical weaknesses of hole displays!” he said.