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China’s Huawei Technologies on Friday started presales for its Mate 60 Pro+ smartphone, adding a new version to the latest flagship series.
With no prior advertising, the company announced on its official online store that it would start taking orders for the phone from 10:08 am with delivery by October 9. Specifications of the phone touted its capability to link-up to two satellites concurrently and larger internal storage versus the Mate 60 Pro. It did not release its price.
This top-of-the-line Mate handset has 4 gigabytes more memory than the Pro version, which sells for 6,999 yuan, and offers a 1-terabyte maximum storage option, same as Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro Max.
Huawei also launched the Huawei Mate X5, a new version of its foldable phone series.
Influential Republican lawmaker Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House of Representatives’ committee on China, on Wednesday called on the US Department of Commerce to end all technology exports to both Huawei and SMIC, following the recent discovery of advanced new chips used on the new Mate smartphone, according to a Reuters report.
“This chip likely could not be produced without US technology and thus, SMIC may have violated the Department of Commerce’s Foreign Direct Product Rule,” Gallagher said in a statement.
Canadian semiconductor research firm TechInsights said in its handset teardown analysis that SMIC made the Kirin 9000s via its 7-nanometer process, known as the N+2 node. This has fuelled speculation that the country’s top chip foundry was helping Huawei clandestinely overcome stifling US tech sanctions.
South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix said it has opened an investigation into the use of its chips in the Mate 60 Pro after TechInsights’ handset teardown found its memory and flash storage inside the device, according to a Bloomberg report. “SK Hynix is strictly abiding by the US government’s export restrictions,” a company spokeswoman was quoted in the report as saying.