As recently as a couple of years ago, most smartphone owners viewed anything beyond the 1080p screen present on handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and LG G2 as superfluous, having no uses except VR, which wasn’t quite mainstream, and draining battery faster. Huawei CEO Yu Chengdong would tend to agree, saying that higher-resolution screens on such a small panel were a gimmick and that users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference with their naked eye, which is how they’d be viewing the phone most of the time. With the wide availability and huge popularity of solutions for VR like Google’s Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR, he has apparently changed his tune.
The CEO took to Sina Weibo to answer some users who were asking about the possibility of 2K displays. Surprisingly, his reply was that Huawei was hard at work getting 2K displays off the ground for their devices and that a 2K display would be a staple of most future Huawei devices, citing that most users would prefer it that way. Roughly translated, one of his comments reads, “…I have changed my mind and my next phone will be 2K as I like VR!” A complete about-face from his previous stance, where he said that 1080p was all that was really needed, not really taking VR into consideration when thinking about the user experience on a mobile device.
The surprising answer from the Huawei CEO could mean that the very next Huawei flagship to hit the market, likely to be the P10 or the Mate 9, after the recent releases of both the Mate 8 and P9, could have 2K displays. Obviously, since 2K panels are a bit on the expensive side and tend to suck down battery and bog down slower processors and graphics chips, 2K resolution probably won’t be a feature on any of the company’s lower-end offerings, although it may show up in a mid-range device in the high side of the range, given the metal build and high amount of RAM in recent and upcoming phones like the HTC One A9 and Samsung Galaxy C5. Whatever the plan may be, Yu’s words make it clear that 2K mobile displays and considerations for VR will be part of Huawei’s future.