Tech

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: “Huawei Pura 70.” While you wouldn’t ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei’s software, the “Ultra” model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens.

In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a “point-and-shoot camera.” This was a purpose-built device that only took photos, couldn’t go on the Internet, and wouldn’t let you watch the latest TikTok videos. The trademark feature of these devices was a retractable camera lens, where the front lens (there was only one!) would grow out of the front of the camera when you turned it on. This would give your camera better, longer lens geometry to work with when the camera was on, and would collapse down for easier storage when it was off.

Huawei’s latest phone is replicating that. The giant rear camera lens actually grows out of the phone somewhat, thanks to some complicated gearing inside the phone. It’s only the tiniest few millimeters, but it’s a start. Smartphone manufacturers often resist adding bigger lenses to their devices because they want to still have pocketable devices. A pop-up lens would give the camera engineers more room to work with while still maintaining pocketability.

The retractable camera lens uses a 50MP, 1-inch sensor and apparently also has an adjustable aperture of F1.6~F4.0. There’s no optical zoom (which could be a justification for the pop-out lens)—so it looks like the lens movement is just to get set up to the base lens configuration. (We’re working from a machine-translated Chinese-language website, in our defense.) There are two other cameras in the rear triangle-shaped camera bump: a 40MP ultrawide and a 50MP 3.5x telephoto.

Huawei’s spec sheet makes zero mention of the SoC. There is not even a name or model number—we’re just left to assume that there must be an SoC in there somewhere. According to Geekbench uploads, it’s called the “Kirin 9010,” which sounds like a minor upgrade over Huawei’s current chip. US sanctions mean Huawei is stuck attempting to build chips without the help of current state-of-the-art chip production tools and facilities from US-aligned countries. A lot has been made of these chips in the tech press—Huawei doesn’t have access to new chip manufacturing equipment, can’t get the newest designs from ARM, and can’t have its designs made at the industry-leading chip fab, TSMC. The company has been relying on Chinese partner SMIC for fabrication, using the old machines from the pre-sanction era, and has kept on trucking with less competitive chips that seem frozen in time.

Huawei, to its credit, hasn’t hyped up its post-sanction chips that much (it’s not even talking about this one!). In November 2020, before US sanctions had really taken hold, the company worked with Arm to create the Kirin 9000, a 5 nm SoC with four Cortex A77 CPUs and four Cortex A55 CPUs. Three years later, Huawei’s first post-sanction chip was the modestly named “Kirin 9000s,” a reportedly 7 nm chip that was scraped together with whatever technology Huawei could find. The general vibe you get from the model number change of 9000 to 9000s is “not much of an improvement,” and the benchmarks have proven that to be true. The new chip in the Pura 70 is a “Kirin 9010” and is probably still 7 nm. So even Huawei is admitting it’s not making much progress without the US-aligned chip ecosystem.

Other specs include a whopping 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on the “Ultra” model. There’s a 6.8-inch, 120 Hz OLED with a 2844×1260 resolution, and the battery is 5200 mAh. The phone only has Wi-Fi 6e, not Wi-Fi 7, presumably thanks to Uncle Sam. All of these components are going to be from random, off-the-beaten-path manufacturers who are brave enough to go against the will of the US government, so who knows how well anything works.

Anyway, we just wanted to write about the neat camera lens. It’s only for sale in China starting today, with the Ultra model clocking in at 9,999 Yuan, or about $1,380.

Correction: We updated this at 5: 41pm to change the Kirin 9000 from 5 nm to 7 nm, so the switch to SMIC went backward one generation.

The humanoid robotics market is starting to heat up, and the company that’s been doing this the longest isn’t going to sit by and watch. Boston Dynamics has a new humanoid robot that the company says represents a path to commercialization. It’s the company’s next-generation, all-electric “Atlas” robot.

While new Atlas and old Atlas share a name, they couldn’t be more different when it comes to construction. The old Atlas—a research platform and viral sensation that could handle nearly any terrain, do backflips, and pick up heavy objects—was powered by a heavy, complicated hydraulics system. The new Atlas is all-electric and looks like it’s a fraction of the size and weight of the hydraulic version. It also looks like a product, with covers around all the major components and consumer-friendly design touches like a giant status light in the head and a light-up power button that looks like it was ripped right from the Spot assembly line.

Hydraulic Atlas is being retired to make way for the all-electric version. The company posted one last goodbye video for the hydraulic model on its YouTube page, showing the history of the project. Atlas has done a lot of neat tricks over the years, but getting there has required a lot of learning—part of that is taking some absolutely gnarly slams, which are highlighted in the video. The video seemed to go out of its way to show just how cumbersome hydraulics can be. At one point, it looks like Atlas’ foot completely breaks off, and hydraulic fluid gushes all over the floor. Other times, the robot just springs a leak, and a fine mist of high-pressure fluid sprays everywhere as the robot goes limp. The fluid has a red tinge to it, so with a little imagination, it can look pretty gory!

Look at any clear picture of old Atlas, and you will see a constantly wobbling halo of thick, black hydraulic lines hanging all over the robot. Two lines come out of the backpack and form big hoops around the shoulders, running down the arms to the hands. Two more hoses come out of the bottom of the backpack around the robot’s hips and run down either leg.

The new Atlas removes that complicated and messy hydraulic system. We only get a 30-second look at the new robot, but it shows off some impressive capabilities. It seems like a basic thing, but have you ever seen a humanoid robot stand up? Atlas can do it, and probably in the creepiest way possible. The body is lying face down, and the legs swing up into the air, backward, and get placed down to the left and right side of the robot’s butt in a crazy contortionist’s pretzel position. Both feet get placed flat on the floor, and the robot completes the deepest squat you’ve ever seen, with the hips rotating something like 270 degrees.

From there, the robot’s body is facing away from the camera (we’re not worrying about the head just yet), and then it does the wildest robot turn-around you’ve ever seen. Just below the hip joint, there is another 360 joint in the thigh with no human analog, allowing each leg to longitudinally spin around. So, without moving the hips or robot body at all, the right leg does a 180 spin in place and goes from “knees and toes pointing away from the camera” to “knees and toes pointing at the camera,” and then the left leg does the same. Then the whole torso does a 180 and suddenly the robot is facing a different direction. It’s a zero-radius turnaround, but even that doesn’t seem like an adequate description.

Besides it being creepy to see anything move like this, there’s a point to the madness. This kind of movement would be impossible with hydraulic lines hanging all over the place. Every movement of the old Atlas needed to be made with the limitations of the hydraulic line spaghetti in mind. Move a limb too far, and you will rip a line off and spray fluid everywhere. Just like a human, every joint had a “home” position that you needed to return to, so that everything untangled.

There’s no need for any range-of-motion limits with electric joints. While the knees of the robot look normal, it looks like the head, torso, hips, shoulders, and thigh spinners all look like limitless 360-degree joints. With things like slip rings that can pass electrical wires to a rotating object, all these joints can probably just spin forever and have no home position. Boston Dynamics is calling the new Atlas the “world’s most dynamic humanoid robot.”