Huawei's new phone has a 'hole' new trick

David Wang with the Huawei Nova 4 during its launch event in Dubai on Tuesday.

After about 20,000 tries, Huawei was finally able to assemble arguably its most intricate front system on its smartphone by far, brandished by its first major offering in 2019.
The Chinese smartphone giant unveiled the Nova 4 in Dubai on Tuesday, its first device that features a display with the so-called "punch-hole" design, which houses the front camera system and eliminates the need for a notch that gets in the way of a true edge-to-edge screen design.
A number of brands have either already brought the punch-hole build into the market or are planning to do so; Huawei's own sub-brand, Honor, released a similar smartphone in Dubai yesterday.
At the company's media presentation, Huawei revealed that it had built around 20,000 prototypes of the screen and front camera setup before settling on what is now in the Nova 4.
And it took about 12 months to arrive at this point, says David Wang, UAE country manager of Huawei Consumer Business Group.
"After all the full-functional tests and processes, we believe this is a major technology that can be implemented in the mass market," he told Khaleej Times at the event.
And, obviously, it wasn't that easy, cramming all those important parts into such small crevices.
"First, we had to reconfigure the camera. Second, the screen needed to support the functions [coming with a punch-hole design]. Third, the speakers; we had to make sure that people could still hear clearly even if we squeezed them in into such a small space," Wang explained.
The UAE will be the first market in the Middle East and Africa to receive the device - pre-orders begin on February 8 and sales start on Valentine's Day - a continuation of Huawei's positioning of the UAE as a "priority market", he added.
On the business side, Wang says they expect another 30 per cent growth worldwide in 2019. Last year, Huawei was able to climb to the No.2 spot globally in terms of smartphone shipments on the back of a 50 per cent growth.
The UAE, Wang revealed, achieved "more than that, beyond the average globally". The same 30 per cent figure is also forecasted this year for the country.
Key features of the Dh1,799 Nova 4 include a triple-lens main camera (20MP + 16MP + 2MP), a 25MP front camera, a 6.4-inch screen, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage.
- alvin@khaleejtimes.com