This story is being continuously updated….new updates are being added at the bottom…..

Having an in-house fabrication and/or Silicon designing wing is considered as an extra advantage for any smartphone OEM. To be humble, the secret sauce behind the efficiency of iPhone greatly relies on Apple’s own designed A-series ARM processors.

apple_a12_bionic_details
Apple A12 Bionic: A 7 nm hexacore SoC

Besides Samsung’s Exynos lineup, HiSilicon (a subsidiary of Huawei) and their Kirin series of SoCs are the examples of similar practices in the world of Android. The majority of the Huawei (and Honor) devices are based on Kirin platform, which gives then numerous tuning opportunities.

Moreover, the BSP (Board Support Package) is maintained by Huawei itself. As a result, the OEM can easily provide major Android version updates to legacy devices. For example, they recently started to upgrade Kirin 960 (announced in 2016) based phones to Android Pie based EMUI 9.1.

honor_9_blue_front_back
Honor 9: Powered by Kirin 960, the phone was released in 2017

Kirin 970 succeeded Kirin 960 as the subsequent flagship SoC. It can be found inside numerous popular phones, such as Huawei P20/P20 Pro and Huawei Mate 10 series.

The Chinese OEM conducted both internal and public beta testing of EMUI on these devices. After going through the feedback from the testers, they decided to rollout the stable build of EMUI 9.1 for the following 10 phones:

  • Huawei Mate 10
  • Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  • Huawei Mate 10 Porsche Design
  • Huawei Mate RS Porsche Design
  • Huawei P20
  • Huawei P20 Pro
  • Huawei nova 3
  • Honor 10
  • Honor V10 (sold as Honor View 10 globally)
  • Honor Play

huawei_kirin_970_emui_9.1_rollout

According to Huawei, the rollout has already started since July 20 (and we spotted some evidences too). Initially available for Chinese units, the OTA updates should hit other regional variants of the aforementioned phones in coming weeks.

HuaweiP20
Huawei P20

The main attraction of this brand-new update is GPU Turbo 3.0. Huawei carefully tunes up the GPU part of the SoC to deliver extra juice, even to the most demanding games whenever required.

With this advantage, the player can always enjoy smooth, buttery gameplay without any frame drop. Apart from that, the OEM also brings EROFS as well as ARK Compiler support. Both of these low level optimizations greatly boost the overall performance of the OS.

huawei_erofs_ext4_performance

Previously, the F2FS file system was tailored for flash memory to improve the read and write performance after long-term use. Now, with EROFS, the random read speed will be 20% faster and the system space will provide extra personal storage of up to 1000 pictures or 500 songs. Plus, the read-only memory design isolates outside interference for added security in your system files.

The update can be forced by invoking the Service app inside the phone. Registering the user can ‘Early Adopter’ should immediately deliver the the OTA. Huawei also published the status of EMUI update as whole, details of which can be found here.

honor_view_10_blue_front_back
Honor V10/View 10

Have you already got the EMUI 9.1 update on your phone? Comment below.

Update 1 (August 20)

Honor 10 EMUI 9.1 update is now arriving on Honor 10 devices in the European region (Germany and UK reportedly). Complete story here.

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.

Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

Next article View Article

[Updated] Instagram crashing on all Android phones, but there are workarounds

Here's the crux of the article in video form: New updates are being added at the bottom of this story……. Original story from (June 5, 2018) follows: We're...
Jul 10, 2023 6 Min Read