GPU fairy visits Huawei owners, leaves graphics boost under phones Older readers may recall an era where large computer firms shipped their systems with next year's upgrades already in place. In exchange for a large sum of money, a service technician would come round, open the box, and flick a switch. Huawei has become the second phone maker after Google to offer the same sort of thing – but …
It was complete as far as those that purchased it understood it to be at the time. The article is quite clear that this enhancement was poorly documented let alone marketed. It's a step way too far to complain about a totally free unexpected enhancement to a piece of hardware you purchased some time ago.
People these days really do spend their time looking for things to be annoyed about.
Unless you bought a UK P20 Pro, which is now more than 22 point releases behind the rest of the world in terms of software updates.
Completely ignored by Huawei since release and will definitely be my last Huawei phone.
The positive reviews on the Internet were universally written by people who received a free one.
Nooooooo! That's detrimental for China's economy!
The solution is to supply the wrong plug, then sell you a $1 adapter (that has to be made in China, but not necessarily by Huawei).
Boom! That's NN thousand (NN thousand $CURRENCY) plugs for every second phone sold! (Assuming the other half have their own adapters)
A company shipped hardware with features turned off, pending on the rollout of software which could use said hardware?
I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. After all, we've never heard of that happening in the industry before!
No, wait, we have. Sometimes (e.g. Intel CPU microcode updates), they even turn existing features off; other times, they never get around to turning the feature on.
Case in point: my ancient Nokia N800 table. Fitted with a 400mhz CPU and a PowerVR GPU. Originally, the CPU was clocked at at 330mhz (allegedly due to some DSP issue, though information is thin on the ground); this was then bumped up to 400mhz in a later OS release.
Sadly, official drivers for the PowerVR GPU were never released - I've never dug into the details, but there was a half-hearted attempt by the community to produce some drivers which never made it out of alpha. As such, the N800 presumably just fell back to using the GPU as a basic framebuffer, leaving it to the CPU and DSPs to handle video codecs and UI composition.
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