The front lines of the battle for smartphone dominance over the coming years have grown clearer after Chinese technology firm Huawei presented an AI-powered phone designed to go head-to-head with Samsung and Apple. Features needed to propel a device into the top end are growing increasingly complex and expensive to develop, meaning only the companies with the deepest expertise and pockets can hope to compete.
On the outside, the differences between phones from the world's three biggest smartphone makers are small: they boast a screen stretching from edge to edge, dual cameras for high-quality photos and big batteries. Under the hood, the investments Samsung, Apple and Huawei have made into technology at the heart of the devices is what they hope will set them apart.
Both US giant Apple and Chinese firm Huawei have bet on artificial intelligence capabilities designed to take some of the load off users' shoulders, showcasing them in their phones' cameras at glossy launch events. Announcing its iPhone X last month, Apple showed off unlocking the device by recognising the owner's face.
Huawei on Monday demonstrated its newest smartphone Mate 10 recognising when it was pointed at a plate of food, a vase of flowers or a family pet and adjusting its camera settings automatically. Systems like these are based on so-called "machine learning" - meaning that rather than a human programmer working out from scratch how to recognise a face, for example, a piece of software teaches itself to identify patterns by sifting through mountains of data. Huawei said it had trained its camera on 100 million photos to achieve its speedy image recognition, and also showcased the Mate 10's power for language translation or housekeeping tasks like organising files.
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