China Rising (Premium)

If the past year has proven anything, it’s that smartphone makers need China to thrive. What they don’t need, alas, is the United States.

And that’s a problem for companies that are not based in China. Last year, China-based Huawei surpassed Apple to become the number two smartphone maker by sales volume. And it’s only a matter of time before it passes Samsung to obtain the top spot. As bad, two other Chinese smartphone vendors---Xiaomi and Oppo---could soon join

In a way, this is a lot like last year’s race to see which technology firm would reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. The difference? All those companies---Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft---were from the United States. But in this race, it’s all about China.

Of those three Chinese smartphone makers, I’m most familiar with Huawei. I’ve reviewed several of its products, including a laptop that was, at the time, the single best Windows laptop I’d ever used. More recently, I’ve been using the Huawei Mate 20 Pro with Google Fi as my daily-use smartphone. And, sorry, folks. It is literally the single best smartphone I’ve ever used.

I’ll get to the particulars of that in a formal review soon. But this classification is particularly interesting because it comes on the heels of me purchasing and then returning several new, flagship smartphones and ultimately deciding that none of them were really any better than the phone I was already using. I had taken this as a great life lesson---there’s no need to feed the beast when the phone you’ve already paid for is still working just great---but the Mate 20 Pro throws all that for a loop.

Part of the reason for my love of this device is very particular to my own preferences, what I think of as my decision matrix: Its three-lens camera system is incredible, and it marks the first and only time I’ve evaluated a smartphone camera and found it obviously better than that in a Google Pixel. It’s so good, I’ve told my wife that I may need to actually buy this phone with my own money this year before we make any international trip. It has established a new standard for smartphone camera quality.

This is notable for a number of reasons. In previous years, when I was using an iPhone normally, I would switch to a Nexus or Pixel during trips for two reasons: Its superior camera and inexpensive data access via Google Fi (then called Project Fi). More broadly, however, one of the big stories in the smartphone industry over the past several years is how Google has been able to stick with single lens cameras and still out-perform multi-lens camera systems in iPhones, Samsung handsets, and others thanks to the firm’s advanced AI capabilities.

That advantage is gone. And in the same way that Chinese tech firms are generally thought to provide the biggest AI challenge to US tech firms, Huawei clearly has out-AI’d Google here. These capabilities are all over the phone---and can get complicated and...