Despite some critical headlines, we can’t stop coming back to the guys at Huawei. Their smartphone shipments show no sign of slowing down – 52 million smartphones were shipped last year and they’re the third largest smartphone manufacturer. We were impressed with the P6, their flagship, and the P7 is already winning awards.
Now, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Richard Yu, head of their consumer business group, has spoken out about the company and future plans. It seems that, despite HTC taking another dip into the Windows Phone OS, Huawei won’t be doing the same.
WSJ: For most handset makers Android is the only option. Is that a problem?
Mr. Yu: It’s difficult to say. We have tried using the Windows Phone OS. But it has been difficult to persuade consumers to buy a Windows phone. It wasn’t profitable for us. We were losing money for two years on those phones. So for now we’ve decided to put any releases of new Windows phones on hold. We have worries about Android being the only option, but we have no choice. And we have a good collaboration with Google.
WSJ: Have you ever considered using the Tizen operating system [developed by Samsung and backed by Intel Corp. and others]?
Mr. Yu: We have no plans to use Tizen. Some telecom carriers are pushing us to design Tizen phones but I say “no” to them. In the past we had a team to do research on Tizen but I canceled it. We feel Tizen has no chance to be successful. Even for Windows Phone it’s difficult to be successful.
The Huawei Windows Phones being mention here, from what we can remember, are the Huawei Ascend W1, which is kina mid-range, and the W2, which hasn’t really made it to market in any great way.
Whatever the reasons, it looks like Windows Phone isn’t an OS that is going to appear on a Huawei handset any time soon.