If you purchase a Huawei phone currently, prepare to drive it to the US yourself. A new report says that American shipping company FedEx is refusing to ship Huawei phones now.
A PCMag writer out in London, Adam Smith was using the Huawei P30 Pro for his job at the tech site and tried to send it to PCMag’s New York office so that the site’s Huawei P30 Pro review could be updated. He mailed the phone from London and the phone made it to Indianapolis where it stayed for five hours, only to be returned the same day to Adam Smith in London. When PCMag checked into the reason behind the return, the site was given the following response: “Parcel returned by FedEx, due [sic] US Government issue with Huawei and China Government.”
The site’s very own Sascha Segan took to social media to voice his disapproval over FedEx’s recent action with regard to a phone that PCMag already had in their offices. The site wasn’t trying to ship a new phone, Segan said, but sending the phone they already had in their possession from their London office to their New York office.
This new turn of events in the US-China Trade War seems to be a logical development. What can be known about the Trade War at this point is that Huawei has been blacklisted on the US’s Entity List, and companies have been told they cannot do business with Huawei unless they receive government permission to do so. But at the same time, Huawei smartphones have been banned from being sold in the US, as can be seen with Walmart, the Microsoft Store, and more recently with B&H Photo. The logical extension of blacklisted sales is blacklisted shipments, it would seem.
On one hand, it is disappointing that PCMag could not ship their Huawei P30 Pro from one office in London to another in New York, but FedEx’s refusal to ship Huawei phones is not without merit. After all, if stores are to stop selling them (or have stopped to comply with the Trade War), then shipping Huawei phones would also be out of the question — even if the phone has already been purchased by a consumer or tech site.
FedEx is choosing to comply as an American company, a federal business that does not want to be shut down or halted from its mail operations because it does something that appears to support Huawei. Whether PCMag believes it or not, shipping a Huawei phone, even if it already belongs to a particular site, group, or individual, is tantamount to supporting Huawei. It’s really a bad time to try to update a Huawei phone review as well, in light of the ban, considering that Americans cannot purchase Huawei phones.
The Trade War comes at a time when Huawei’s P30 Pro is said to be a real photography winner. Phone reviewer and YouTuber MKBHD says that the P30 Pro is the “camera king,” is impressed with its lowlight capabilities, though the phone suffers from overexposing photos in daylight and its EMUI software where the fingerprint scanner doesn’t work all the time as it should. Huawei’s fitness tracker called the Watch GT has sold 2 million units globally, but the Trump Ban will likely cause sales of the popular fitness tracker to decline since FedEx in the US has ceased Huawei shipments.
The US-China Trade War began here mid-May when President Donald J. Trump added Huawei to the US Entity List and forbade companies to do business with the Chinese corporation. Since then, Google has revoked Huawei’s Android license, though the full effect won’t happen until August 19th.
While companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and others have done their best to stand up for Huawei by arguing that mobile chips and components have little to do with national security, the reality is that the Chinese Government can use anything to spy on American citizens if it so desires. Huawei doesn’t use Google’s Android or Google apps in China, with Chinese smartphone users experiencing more of an Android Open Source Project (AOSP) setup there with some Huawei apps. The fact that Google’s Android is not embraced in China could hint that the Chinese are spying on their citizens and that they’d do the same on American citizens if their phones sold in the US.
Google has stood up for Huawei by arguing that phones not running Google’s Android are an even greater security risk than phones running it, but the Trump Ban still stands. President Trump has said he’s interested in some kind of trade deal that includes taking Huawei off the blacklist, but Senator Mitt Romney and others have been vocal about Huawei not being part of a trade deal with the US.