Huawei released an official statement in response to yesterday news that certain units of their recently released P10 and P10 Plus flagships feature faster flash memory read and write performance than others. According to Huawei, the memory chips for those phones come from multiple suppliers, all of whom have specific guidelines to follow. These guidelines, provided by Huawei, were supposedly designed to guarantee a smooth operating experience for all P10 and P10 Plus users through holistic integration of all system components, allowing them to work together in an optimized fashion, regardless of the speed or type of memory they’re using. They pointed to the powerful and premium components featured inside the devices such as the Kirin 960 processor and 20-megapixel Leica cameras and also alleged that a simple benchmark won’t tell the whole story in regards to memory performance.
While the company essentially tried to invalidate recent allegations that not all units of the P10 and the P10 Plus offer an identical user experience, that notion still doesn’t deny the possibility that Huawei may have decided against implementing the fastest available memory across its entire product lineup in order to cut costs. Their statement seems to contain no official rebuttal to this allegation, though it’s worth noting the company might still be investigating the issue and will clarify the situation further at a later date. Like many other OEMs, Huawei doesn’t manufacture all components for its phones on its own and contracts often go to the lowest bidder, so long as they promise to meet set guidelines.
In this case, the guidelines that Huawei put forth may have set a low ceiling in regards to memory performance, but their official statement essentially says that the minimum guidelines ensure the kind of user experience that they want for P10 and P10 Plus owners, and part suppliers were free to go above and beyond that. The statement does not outright say that memory performance above that threshold does not create a different user experience, so it’s likely that the units with faster memory read and write speeds will be in stronger demand than others once the P10 and P10 Plus become available worldwide.