Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Bosses' mutual resentment has long been a common "menstrual paste" in the mobile phone circle, so now if you want to cause some public opinion, it is either an enlightening insight or an extremely unreliable sword.

Recently, Lei Jun made an unexpected speech that was a bit embarrassing, saying publicly that "the more R & D costs, the better. Xiaomi's investment of 3.5 billion is already astronomical."

To explain to you in vernacular, it is useless to go to college, it is OK to receive nine-year compulsory education. If you have studied in high school again, you will be regarded as an educated person.

The words of "the uselessness of reading" obviously cannot represent the current situation of the industry. in yesterday's exclusive interview with the new product press conference, Zhao Ming, president of Glory, was questioned by the media. Lei Jun publicly mentioned that "the more R & D expenses, the better" was answered.

He thinks Lei Jun "should have made a joke, because (" reading is useless ") somewhat subverts the basic cognition and common sense of the industry. Glory does not evaluate competitors, or insist that R & D expenses are higher than marketing costs, and focus on improving their core competencies."

In fact, the cost of research and development of mobile phones has risen sharply in the past two years. Data from 2018 show that the real money invested by mobile phone manufacturers in R & D has only gone up. Apple $14.2 billion, Huawei 90 billion yuan, Samsung 13.4 billion, even 300 million more OPPO than Xiaomi.

In this regard, Xiong Junmin, vice president of Glory products, raised several questions on Weibo with the V20 product.

With the same 48 million-pixel IMX586, why is the Glory V20 clearer? It is also a flagship chip, why only the Glory V20 can become a five-star certified phone in Tyre Lab and an official designated phone for UCL? It is also TOF, why only Huawei and Glory can bring more practical experience?

This dispute in the mobile phone world about "the uselessness of reading" may represent a typical question-how much real value can the blessing of cracking technology bring to mobile phone manufacturers?

It is obviously not a rational logic to draw a positive or negative conclusion directly. Let's use an article to analyze it and take the differential "platoon" of Glory V20 as an example to interpret the hidden technical magic.

1. Solving the riddle of "the uselessness of Learning": the interspace Dialogue between Technology and Business

Let's first deduce the focus of this debate: does large-scale R & D investment make sense for mobile phone manufacturers?

If you look at the smartphone launches before and after the emergence of the Glory V20, you will find that most of the technology sections of the previous mobile phone conferences were supported by a few bright spots, while the V20 launched a combination of more than a dozen innovative technologies in one breath. It blossomed at almost every technological level of mobile phones, such as underlying chips, intelligent algorithms, applications, and so on. After that, most of the mobile phone conferences and technical propaganda sessions appeared to be lacklustre.

The reason for this effect is that Huawei and Glory have invested a lot of research and development to integrate the underlying technology into the extreme hardware, bringing different extreme experiences on different products, not just simple hardware enhancements.

To this end, we checked the manufacturers who ranked TOP10 in global mobile phone sales. In 2018, Huawei invested 90 billion yuan in scientific research, accounting for 14.7% of the 2018 turnover, much higher than Apple's 5.1%. It is the number one player valued by Chinese mobile phone manufacturers for research and development.

Analysis data list of the 1000 enterprises with the highest R & D investment in the world

What comes with high investment is that glory has broken down the innovation barriers of individual technologies and begun to challenge more difficult propositions.

Let's take a brief look at what changes Glory V20 have brought to the mobile phone industry:

1. Intelligent. Mobile phone manufacturers often stand at the forefront of intelligent technology application exploration, and the innovation blowout of Glory V20 directly leads the intelligent hardware upgrade of the whole industry. For example, the TOF lens in its debut last year and the 48 million-pixel IMX586 were criticized by competitors as "impractical" and "too advanced" at that time. As a result, everyone quickly used the same specification of hardware.

two。 Collaboration. If hardware standards can be complemented through the supply chain, the applications and services provided by Glory V20 have made smartphones "both hard and soft" over the past year. Glory V20 integrates hardware, software, services and ecology, and the enhancement of "soft power" has also become an object for many manufacturers to emulate.

3. Experiential. Driven by the experience of Glory V20, the market has also begun to move towards "experiential consumption". For example, the Honor V20 intelligent life form YOYO, which is loved by young people, is the upgrade of traditional smartphone voice services. Through the comprehensive forging of software and hardware service ecology, it has become an intelligent life form, providing a lot of surprise experiences in life details.

So far, we can find that although R & D investment and product sales are at both ends of the industrial chain, they complement each other and constitute the double helix DNA of smartphones. Research and development promotes the growth of sales, at the same time, sales have also become an indispensable force for continued investment.

Obviously, the theory that too much R & D investment is worthless is a false proposition.

two。 Glory V20: the technological Truth behind differentiation

The general public may not have any intuitive feeling about the correlation between R & D investment and mobile phone experience. On the other hand, the Glory V20's comprehensive thinking and ability of "arranging troops" for technology finally presents the ultimate experience upgrade. How on earth did you do that?

We might as well disassemble some technical parameters and configurations of V20 to restore the technical truth behind it:

First of all, with the same 48 million-pixel camera, why is the Glory V20 so much better than other phones?

The reason is that thanks to the glorious intelligent optimization algorithm of AI, the ability of Sensor is brought into full play. The algorithm can make intelligent judgment in different photo scenes, and the leading technology at the bottom and the cooperation of top hardware create a lasting chemical reaction.

The second question, which is also the flagship chip, why can Glory V20 get the double recognition of Tencent UCL and Tyre five-star certification? On the one hand, Glory has the hardware capabilities of the self-developed AI chip Kirin 980. on the other hand, the intelligent system EMUI can maximize the advantages of the chip through multiple technology matrix. for example, GPU Turbo 3.0 on V20 enhances graphics performance, LINK TURBO enhances network performance, launch WLAN three antennas, THE NINE liquid cooling and so on, which can show faster speed, smoother images and higher quality definition in reality.

The last question, also TOF, why only Huawei and Glory can bring more practical experience?

TOF deeply feels that the lens brings vigorous imagination to the functional innovation of mobile phones in the 5G era. 3D video slimming, 3D somatosensory games, YOYO dances and so on are all very popular features in Honor V20. But it is not to add the same hardware to the mobile phone to achieve a similar effect. In order to give full play to the efficiency of TOF, we often need very strong edge computing power and algorithm support to achieve low-delay capture and recognition. At this time, the hardware and software collaboration of Glory "chip + algorithm" plays a very key role.

Knowing the truth of the technology behind these hardware, we naturally understand that in addition to introducing the same hardware, in order to achieve the technical vitality of Glory V20, we also need strong underlying computing units and intelligent optimization algorithms. For the glory of taking root in R & D and having many of its own technologies, it is so simple to pull apart differentiation.

3. Multiplication effect: the Secret of Glory Technology superposition

The word "the same" is not only a kind of language art, but also reflects the "tip of the iceberg" of homogenization of mobile phone configuration.

Consumers who have been bombarded by AI, 3D structured light, face recognition and other technical terms to "aesthetic fatigue", it is difficult to rely on one or two technical terms to easily move. In this case, the hardware upgrade is only a guarantee for Glory V20 to gain a foothold, and the co-operation of hardware and software is its surprise "magic", which I call the "multiplication effect".

It may sound hard to understand, but let's take the widely emphasized photography technology as an example to see how Glory V20 achieves effect addition through the synergy of hardware and software.

Friends with a good memory will remember that there was a war of words over TOF footage when Honor V20 was released last year. Xiaomi executives believe that "TOF is a gimmick, useless", there are other manufacturers only stay at the PPT level, talking on paper, while Glory believes that TOF is an important technological direction in the field of mobile imaging.

The top two phones on this year's DXO list are equipped with TOF lenses, and when the industry began to adopt DXO MARK as the standard for evaluating the photo experience, Zhao Ming said confidently that the Honor V20 DXO MARK also has the strength to get high scores and will show you the report card soon.

We don't spend much time on the "really fragrant" incident of TOF, but we just happen to take this opportunity to disassemble it. It is also full of longing for forward-looking technology such as TOF lens. Why does Glory V20 dare and can make the impossible possible?

1. Hardware support. The effect of TOF stereoscopic deep lens is realized through the real-time analysis of 3D information of the target in the deformation and reflection of light, which requires a very strong edge computing ability to support, and Glory V20 dares to launch this function ahead of time, which is precisely due to the super computing power provided by Kirin 980. The Kirin 980s equipped with double NPU can quickly identify and calculate the target information captured by the TOF lens in real time, thus making the landing of the TOF possible.

two。 Software assists. The emergence of Snapdragon 855 has also deterred many manufacturers from trying TOF lenses. Still, why is Glory V20 so far ahead in TOF apps? This is about to mention the assists of various intelligent algorithms of "soft power". Glory integrates TOF depth detection algorithm, AR engine algorithm, motion recognition and driving algorithm, and allocates computing resources more reasonably on the basis of the original hardware computing power, which enables the phone to realize the functions of stereo capture, scanning modeling, bone recognition and so on without stutter and low energy consumption.

3. The brain of application. In order for TOF to be truly perceived by consumers from "technical terms", it is also necessary to effectively and interestingly reprocess the difficult technical functions on the application side. For example, in addition to a series of applications such as 3D video slimming, 3D somatosensory games and YOYO dancing, Glory V20 is a popular calorie-burning challenge among bosses not long ago, which is a national "popular science entertainment" about TOF. After completing this step, the full link of a complete "technology sinking consumer market" will be completely opened.

A similar story is happening on Sony IMX586.

In a group of horizontal tests of photo taking ability of Honor V20, Xiaomi 9, vivo X27, OPPO Reno and so on, why can Glory V20 still take the lead in HD photography nearly 4 months after it was released, which is also the 48 million camera of Sony IMX586? The key factor is also the high blessing of the hardware capability of the AI intelligent optimization algorithm.

Looking at these three aspects, the success of Glory V20 is based on the continuous progress of the overall technical strength, trying to combine a variety of technologies to achieve an effect similar to "multiplication".

From the glory V20 "software and hardware integration" technology solution, perhaps we can also think about such a question, when cool techs is no longer black, how does the mobile phone innovation story support?

The Glory V20 is still leading and competitive in the same product until now, which is an excellent answer. From this point of view, it is worthwhile to invest more R & D efforts. Understanding Glory V20 is more like a high-five in R & D and business.

We expect more aspiring manufacturers to feel the energy output and commercial value of technology, so as to bring about the innovation of intelligent terminals in China. Not just because of the lack of skills, just give up the appearance of life.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.