Huawei has been making smartphones for years, and at its peak, the company was creating handsets that led the market in terms of design and camera performance.
However, the diplomatic link between China and the US broke in 2019, which saw the US add Huawei to its Entity List, effectively forcing the Chinese tech corporation to stop doing business with American companies.
The development was motivated by issues that have never really be laid bare for the public, but the assumption is that it engaged in corporate espionage to steal intellectual property from its rivals.
This has resulted Huawei’s drop in terms of ranking, shipment and overall marketing of its phones because it was selling them to customers that extensively use Google services, which have since been booted out of its devices.
It also accelerated the development of HarmonyOS, which runs in a couple of its devices. While we have not seen such smart devices in Kenya, its native China is served by Huawei smartphones, tablets, and even TVs that run the new OS.
Speaking of Kenya, Huawei hasn’t abandoned this market, yet. It still has a lot of fans here (some of whom have rightfully moved on to other brands), and continues to take part in its enterprise business by working with telcos, including Safaricom (which is testing 5G services using technologies from Huawei and ZTE, among others).
And while the company put a temporary break on phone releases (it released one or two smartphones locally between 2020-2021) in Kenya, it has since made a revival with a bunch of launches.
The nova 9 SE, for instance, is here already, and we love its camera performance owing to the fact that it outputs better images than the competition. The device goes for KES 40,000.
The nova 9 is here too, and retails at KES 66000. Other such as the flagship P50 and P50 Pro can also be purchased locally from authorized Huawei stores.
More phones for budget customers
Huawei is also announcing it will be bringing the nova Y series to the Kenyan market.
These are budget devices, meaning they are affordable, and are equally capable thanks to their large screens, big batteries, and dependable cameras, for the price.
The nova Y60, for instance, has some great specifications for a phone that costs around KES 20,000. It has:
- 6.6” screen at HD+ resolution
- Dual SIM
- Android 10 (this is bad) with EMUI, but no Google apps
- MTK Helio P35
- Triple rear snapper with a 13MP main sensor
- 5000 mAh cell
Of course, this is a phone from late 2021, and it is unlikely Huawei has plans to bring it here. We hope, anyway, that the nova Y series phones its prepping for the Kenyan market will be attractive in all fronts to win them some customers because the competition here is stiff, from the likes of vivo, realme and other phones by Transsion (TECNO, Infinix and itel).
