How does a little-known smartphone brand compete with the marketing budget of a Samsung or the halo that once adorned Apple products? That is a key question as the battlefront of the ongoing mobile war quickly moves from North America to East Asia.
If anyone is caught by surprise, it is only because they have forgotten recent history. Scandinavia appeared to have a lock on the market less than a decade ago with brands like Nokia and Ericsson, and Canada briefly owned the smartphone market during the ascendancy of BlackBerry.
The advent of the iPhone moved the focus to California and the innovation led by Steve Jobs convinced many that Apple could never be toppled. History insists that no brand remains on top indefinitely.
So, even as Samsung claims the throne for South Korea with two successive sales triumphs in the Galaxy S3 and S4, it cannot be oblivious to a newcomer.
It is Chinese, it is called Huawei and it is easy to dismiss as a manufacturer of cheap phones that should stick to its core business of networking equipment (Huawei makes most of the 3G dongles used in South Africa). However, it has evolved dramatically in the past year. Most notably, in 2012 Huawei launched one of the best "mid-range" smartphones on the market, the Ascend P1. Very little marketing firepower was put behind it, though, and it was off-loaded at fire-sale prices towards the end of the year - giving it the distinction of briefly being the bestselling phone in South Africa.
At 7.7mm, it was the thinnest smartphone in the world, but this did not give it the propulsion needed to emulate its northern neighbours.
Now it has pushed that advantage to what, for the time being, appears to be the limit of phone slimming. The Ascend P6, launched in London rather than in its home base of China - itself a strong statement of intent - is an absurd 6.18mm thick. That number was writ large on billboards outside the launch venue, stressing that this feature is the most powerful weapon in the P6 armoury.
It has other strengths, of course, not least the combination of an eight megapixel rear camera and five megapixel front camera, along with 10 levels of face enhancement dubbed "Beauty Level". It is as powerful as most leading smartphones, with a 1.5GHz processor, although it lags in battery, with a 2000 milliamps-hour unit versus the Galaxy S4's 2600mAh.
Despite being thinner yet having a much larger display than the iPhone, it looks uncannily like a design that might have been overseen by Steve Jobs.
As with the HTC One, which has been lionised by critics partly because of its iPhone-style lines, Huawei is counting on that old familiar feeling.
The killer feature of the phone - because it needs to be to compete aggressively - is price. The European cost when it is released in August will be à449. Indications are that it will retail in South Africa at between R5000 and R6000.
During a press conference on Tuesday, executives refused to be drawn on the size of the marketing budget. That could be the most important feature of all. To get the same kind of attention as an S4, you cannot skimp on marketing budget. As much as this is a war of specifications, it is also a war for attention.
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee
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