People queue outside a Huawei store in Shanghai for the newly released Mate 70 series on November 26, 2024. Photo: VCG

Chinese tech giant Huawei officially unveiled its Mate 70 series smartphones at a gala event on Tuesday. The new series features Huawei's own operating system (O/S) and includes the world debut of a satellite paging system for mobile phones. This marks a significant step in Huawei's efforts to lead innovation in the smartphone sector, experts said.

The device is the "the most powerful Mate phone ever," Richard Yu Chengdong, Huawei's executive director and chairman of the board of directors of the consumer business group, said on Tuesday at an event in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, according to media reports.

The starting price for the series is 5,499 yuan ($757.6). Pre-sales began on November 18 and over 3.34 million orders were placed as of 6 pm on Tuesday, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Yu said the Mate 70 series runs on Huawei's own O/S - HarmonyOS NEXT, which, together with a new hardware configuration, boosts the overall performance of the series by 40 percent. 

Huawei released its self-developed HarmonyOS NEXT in October. It is the first fully self-developed mobile O/S in China and also marks the world's third major mobile O/S following Apple's iOS and Android, Xinhua reported.

The launch of the Mate 70 series could further advance the commercial use of HarmonyOS NEXT, Xiang Ligang, a veteran telecom industry expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

During the Tuesday event, Yu said that the Mate 70 series is equipped with the world's first satellite paging technology, the Securities Times reported.

The introduction of satellite paging technology marks a significant innovation in the field of communication, as it addresses the challenges of communicating in remote areas or places without network coverage, greatly enhancing the communication performance and user experience of smartphones, Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"This technology is expected to set a new standard in the smartphone industry, leading toward a more intelligent and efficient future for the industry," Wang said.

For other features, Yu said that the Mate 70 series provides enhanced network performance in scenarios such as photo posting during concerts, making video calls on high-speed trains, watching videos in the metro, and QR code scanning in the basement. Notably, this smartphone can reconnect to the network within one second after exiting an elevator, showcasing its advanced connectivity capabilities.

In terms of durability, the Mate 70 Pro+ has special screen glass on the front and the overall drop resistance of the device has been improved by 20 times, Yu said.

"These advancements are expected to drive technological innovation, enhance user experience, and inject new vitality and momentum into the future development of the smartphone sector," Wang said.