Five years ago, in London, when Nokia was no longer what it was, and was already under the yoke of Microsoft, the former Finnish company brought to London the cream of the national and international press, both technological and specialized in photography. , to show the world the first mobile that integrated a camera with more than 40 megapixels of resolution.
Already at that time, in 2013, and so that the camera that occupied a large part of the back of the device could work at full capacity, Nokia developed an image compression algorithm so that the photographs taken with the smartphone did not weigh more than 3MB in size in JPG format. In addition, the software that integrated the Nokia team allowed mechanical stabilization so that the images were not blurred, or to adjust the exposure, contrast, and so on.
No one before that presentation, and no one after, dared to incorporate a smartphone with such a camera, and a software and processor that was capable of handling its capabilities so that the user, professional or not, could ‘play’ with the camera to be the best photographer.
Now Huawei dares to do it, and that is why he calls it ‘A Renaissance in photography’. And that is why I remember that Nokia that also dared and tried five years ago to ‘be reborn’ from the ashes in which it was plunged not to believe in multi-touch screens, among other details, succumbing and almost disappearing before the iPhone hurricane.
Today Huawei takes the witness of that Nokia Lumia 1020 with a very defined objective: to dominate the smartphone market worldwide to unseat Samsung by volume of device unit sales, and Apple by volume of business. Complicated task, but not impossible.
And Huawei will spare no effort to achieve it. The P20 Pro presented in Paris is, without any doubt, the most advanced mobile device in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and from a technical point of view that there is at the moment. Well, being strictly rigorous, it will be when it is marketed in April.
The new device integrates the first ‘triple camera’ with Leica optics on the market, which is actually four if we also count the front one. The three rear ones, with resolutions of 40 -remembering the Lumia 1020-, 20 and 8 megapixels, and the front one of 24. And all of them managed by the CPU, the GPU and the neural processor that contains the Kirin 970 chip that Huawei released. last October in the Mate 10 model and that makes it possible to offer users intelligent capabilities until now unimaginable to be able to take full advantage of the equipment’s cameras.
Kirin 970 is the first mobile processing platform for artificial intelligence to have a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Manufactured using an advanced 10 nanometer lithography process, Kirin 970 condenses 5.5 million transistors into a surface area of just 1 cm². The chipset is powered by an 8-core CPU and a 12-core next-generation GPU. Compared to a chipset with a Cortex-A73 quad-core CPU, the Kirin 970’s new heterogeneous processing architecture enables it to deliver 25 times the performance, with 50 times the efficiency.
The Kirin 970 processor in the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro and the neural network processing unit (NPU) allow effortless photography for the newest in this field. Artificial intelligence object and scene recognition has the ability to identify 19 scenarios and more than 500 different objects, as well as choose the right skills for the right time. With Huawei’s new advanced 4D predictive focus camera system, the camera predicts the movement of objects and focuses on them with extreme efficiency to capture moving details. Another novelty is AI-Assisted Composition, which provides smart suggestions for framing group and landscape shots.
To be able to take snapshots in the most absolute darkness and to be able to identify objects, take zoomed photographs and be able to clearly identify images, use super slow or slow motion and not lose luminosity, or use the intelligent image stabilization system, for For example, these are some of the capabilities of the new triple cameras that a non-photographer can use with the automatic mode, and all this thanks to the artificial intelligence that has been enriched in the device’s chip since the launch of the Mate 10 in October. past. And I attest that all these capabilities, compared to the same of other flagship or Premium devices from other brands, are the best, and by far. Although the tests were carried out in conditions prepared by Huawei and indoors, now we will have to do them in more real situations and not in the laboratory. And we will compare again.
Analysts, such as Deloitte Global, said it and say it: “the first difference or characteristic by which users decide to buy a device today is its camera, or more precisely, the image taken by the camera. that the smartphone is capable of displaying on its screen once it has been processed by the software and the integrated chip ”.
And this race, struggle, battle or whatever you want to call it, has only just begun. AI has come to smartphones to evolve the use of its functions and to make life easier for users. And the camera is one of the first fields of this battle. But there will be more, and we will tell.
