AI phone entry war: Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent chart four paths
An analysis piece published by TMTPost lays out how China's biggest tech players are approaching AI phones: Huawei's Mate 90 series, launched Oct 1, is described as running a 30B MoE omni-modal model on-device via the Kirin 9050 Pro; Alibaba pairs its Qwen Intelligence stack with Honor for device-cloud co-development; ByteDance and Nubia launched the second-gen Doubao phone, NaviX Ultra, billed as the "world's first AI agent phone"; and Tencent avoids the system-level agent race, instead plugging into Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, OPPO and vivo through WeChat's A2A protocol while working with Qualcomm to deploy Hunyuan 7B/3B on-device. The article cites an IDC forecast of 147 million next-gen AI phones shipping in China in 2026, up 31.6% year on year and 53% of the market.
AI phones are becoming the key battleground for model vendors seeking a terminal-level entry point, and the outcome hinges on interaction paradigms and revenue-sharing as much as model quality.