Tech Giants: Starting from Bankrupt Companies

136: Chapter 136 The Light of Dawn. The Roar of the DragonMobile Phone Product Manager walked out from the side of the stage.

No spotlight followed him, and no host introduced him. He simply walked to the center of the stage, standing beneath the logo, holding that phone in his hand.

In the audience, the sound of shutters rang out like a rainstorm. The flashes illuminated him as if he were standing before a judgment seat, but he remained motionless, quietly looking down at the crowd.

Ten seconds. Twenty seconds.

He was waiting—waiting for all the restlessness to subside, waiting for everyone’s attention to focus on this single point.

At the thirty-fifth second, he raised the phone.

”Good afternoon.”

His voice spread throughout the venue via the high-fidelity sound system, calm and clear, without any performative excitement.

”I am Mobile Phone Product Manager, General Manager of Huaxing Communication Products.” He paused. ”Today, we are not here to release a phone—”

He paused intentionally, letting the sentence hang in the air.

”—but to redefine the meaning of ’smart’.”

The large screen lit up, a line of white text appearing on a pure black background:

”When good enough is not enough.”

(When ”good enough” is no longer enough)

Spec Slaughter

”Let’s start with the most basic, yet most important part.” The screen behind Mobile Phone Product Manager switched, showing the silhouettes of three phones: iPhone X, Samsung S9 (labeled ”unreleased, based on leaked specs”), and the Huaxing HX1 MAX in the center.

”The screen.”

The stage lights focused on the device in his hand. The screen lit up with a pure white image, its brightness turned to the maximum.

”Over the past five years, the peak brightness of flagship phones has increased from 500 nits to 1000 nits. We asked ourselves: is that enough?” Mobile Phone Product Manager shook his head. ”It’s not. Because under the midday sun, in the snow, or on the sea—these scenarios where humans need phones the most—1000 nits is still not clear enough.”

He pressed the remote, and the large screen played a video: a tester wearing sunglasses operated a phone under the midday sun by Namtso Lake in Tibet. The screens of the iPhone X and Samsung S9 were almost unrecognizable, while the HX1’s screen was as clear as ever.

”1500 nits peak brightness,” Mobile Phone Product Manager said. ”We call it Kunlun Glass—Spark Industry’s first-generation OLED screen. Clarity under sunlight has increased by 300%, and at the same time, we’ve solved the color shift issue at high brightness.”

He pulled up a color contrast chart: ”Traditional OLEDs tend to shift towards blue when exceeding 1200 nits. We redesigned the pixel arrangement and color compensation algorithms, keeping the ΔE (color deviation value) at 1500 nits below 1.5—the standard for professional monitors.”

Low gasps of amazement came from the audience. Reporters in the front row took notes frantically.

”But brightness isn’t everything.” Mobile Phone Product Manager switched slides. ”Power consumption. High brightness means high power consumption; that’s a law of physics. But we’ve rewritten another law.”

A power consumption comparison curve appeared on the screen: ”In the 800-nit range, which is most common for daily use, the HX1’s power consumption is 22% lower than the iPhone X’s. How did we do it?”

He walked to the edge of the stage, as if talking directly to the audience: ”New organic light-emitting materials, with electron mobility doubled; a new driver circuit, with conversion efficiency increased by 30%; and—” he deliberately drew out his voice, ”we designed a separate co-processor for the screen to optimize the voltage of every pixel in real-time.”

”This chip, we call it Zhulong—the god from ancient Chinese mythology who controls light and darkness.”

Below the stage, a testing expert from DisplayMate had already stood up, craning his neck to see more clearly.

”The processor.” Mobile Phone Product Manager moved to the next section. ”flint no. 2, 16-nanometer process.”

A slight sound of disappointment came from the audience—16nm lagged behind TSMC’s 10nm and the soon-to-be mass-produced 7nm.

”Process numbers are important, but they aren’t everything.” Mobile Phone Product Manager smiled, as if he had long anticipated this reaction. ”We designed a brand-new Taiji Architecture: four large cores for performance and four small cores for efficiency. But the key is—they aren’t in fixed pairs; they can be dynamically reorganized based on the task.”

An architecture diagram appeared on the large screen, its complex logic flow dazzling the non-professionals.

”Simply put, when you’re gaming, all eight cores can run at maximum frequency; when you’re watching videos, the four small cores work while the four large cores sleep; and when you’re just on standby, only a single minimum core runs at 0.8GHz.” Mobile Phone Product Manager pulled up a benchmark chart. ”The result: Geekbench multi-core performance exceeds the A11 by 15%, while power consumption is reduced by 20%.”

The moment the benchmark chart appeared, the entire audience gasped.

The iPhone X’s A11 chip was the king of multi-core performance, an industry consensus. And now, a 16nm processor had surpassed it.

”Impossible...” the Bloomberg News reporter whispered to his colleague. ”Unless their architectural efficiency is twice that of Apple’s.”

”Or they optimized for the benchmarks,” the colleague responded.

Mobile Phone Product Manager seemed to hear the doubts from below: ”All benchmarks were conducted in default mode, without any ’performance mode’ enabled. We welcome any third-party organization to retest—if the data is incorrect, I will personally resign.”

Decisive and unwavering.

”Storage,” he continued. ”Kunyu storage chip, with read speeds 1.8 times that of UFS 2.1. We redesigned the flash controller, reducing read/write latency by 40%. It’s the first-generation storage from Xinghuo Chip.”

He demonstrated a simple comparison: opening a 2GB large-scale game simultaneously. The iPhone X took 12 seconds, while the HX1 took 7 seconds.

”For RAM, we offer three versions: 4GB, 6GB, and 8GB. For internal storage, starting at 64GB and going up to 256GB, and—” he paused, ”it supports microSD card expansion.”

Applause erupted from below. This had been a pain point for Android users for years—flagship phones generally removed expansion card support for the sake of profit.

”Battery.” Mobile Phone Product Manager held up the phone. ”Divine Travel 2nd Gen ternary lithium battery, with a 4500mAh capacity for the MAX version.

Once the numbers were out, the audience was in an uproar again. The iPhone X only had 2716mAh.

”But high capacity isn’t the core issue,” Mobile Phone Product Manager shook his head. ”Safety is.”

The large screen played a test video: in a lab, technicians pierced the battery with a steel needle. Traditional batteries instantly caught fire and exploded, while the Divine Travel 2nd Gen only emitted a wisp of blue smoke and then fell silent.

Crush test: a hydraulic press applied 500 kilograms of pressure; the battery deformed but did not catch fire.

High-temperature test: placed in a 150-degree oven for an hour, it still worked normally after being taken out.

”We redesigned the electrolyte formula and separator materials, and through the nano-ceramic coating provided by Spark Materials, we reduced the probability of thermal runaway to one in a billion,” Mobile Phone Product Manager said. ”This means you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than for the HX1 battery to explode.”

The audience laughed, but it was a laugh filled with shock.

”Charging speed,” he continued. ”55W super fast charge, fully charged in 30 minutes—from 0 to 100%.”

A charging demonstration video played: the battery percentage jumped at a rate visible to the naked eye. At 29 minutes and 47 seconds, the screen displayed ”100%.”

”And the temperature never exceeds 42 degrees throughout the process,” Mobile Phone Product Manager added. ”We’ve built in 12 temperature sensors to adjust the charging current in real-time. Fast, but safely fast.”

Camera Revolution

”Cameras.” Mobile Phone Product Manager switched to this most sensitive topic. ”Competition in mobile photography has become a competition of digital games—multi-frame synthesis, AI beautification, and algorithmic blurring. But we want to return to the essence of photography: light.”

A structural diagram of the camera module appeared on the large screen.

”Light and Shadow 2.0 module, the biggest innovation is here—” He pointed to a mechanical structure. ”Variable aperture. From f/1.5 to f/2.4, adjustable in four steps.”

Below the stage, an observer sent by Sony’s sensor division sat up straight.

”This is technology transplanted from DSLRs, but to implement it on a phone, we had to solve three problems: size, power consumption, and reliability.” Mobile Phone Product Manager pulled up a teardown diagram. ”We used a miniature stepper motor with a diameter of only 3 millimeters; we designed a brand-new gear structure that passed life tests of 500,000 switches. Power consumption? The power used for one aperture adjustment is equivalent to the screen being lit for 0.3 seconds.”

He showed sample photos.

First group: Night scene. The iPhone X’s sample was already good, but the details became a blurry mess when zoomed in. The HX1’s sample, zoomed to 200%, showed clearly discernible brick textures and leaf veins.

”A large aperture allows more light but has a shallow depth of field; a small aperture has a deep depth of field but allows less light,” Mobile Phone Product Manager explained. ”Traditional phones are stuck with a fixed compromise. We, however, can choose based on the scene—using a large aperture for portraits to blur the background, and a small aperture for landscapes to keep everything sharp.”

Second group: Backlighting. In a portrait under the setting sun, the dark details of the face were lost on the iPhone X, while the face was bright on the HX1, and the layers of the sunset in the background were still preserved.

”HDR?” a reporter asked loudly.

”Not exactly,” Mobile Phone Product Manager shook his head. ”We take three photos with different exposures at once, but we use the variable aperture to capture three negatives with different depths of field and then synthesize them—ensuring both dynamic range and natural depth-of-field transitions. This requires massive computational power, so we specifically designed a Light and Shadow Engine within the ISP (Image Signal Processor).”

Third group: Macro. For a water droplet on a petal, the iPhone X could only capture a blurry outline, while the HX1 could capture the entire world reflected in the droplet.

”Minimum focusing distance: 2 centimeters,” Mobile Phone Product Manager said. ”We redesigned the lens group structure, using three aspherical lenses and one ED (Extra-low Dispersion) lens—a first for mobile phones.”

He put down the remote and looked at the audience. ”Some say phones will never replace DSLRs. I agree. But what we want to do is not replace them, but to allow more people to enjoy the pleasure of photography—without having to learn complex parameters, just raising your hand and taking a great photo.”