A great aftersales customer experience is always crucial in maintaining a brand’s reputation in the industry, especially in the smartphone industry. While smartphone manufacturers always promise 2-5 years of software support for their devices in the long run, these major software updates normally take up more and more space in your old phone. 

Coupled in with the apps, photos and videos you’ve taken throughout the years, phone storage space running low is normally an annoyance for those who are using their old phones. And you can’t directly add more storage to your smartphone right? Or can you?

In China, Huawei has proposed a solution for these old phone users to extend their phones’ life cycle without having to pay a premium. Huawei officially calls this aftersales service as “Internal Storage Upgrade Solution”. The service has been running in China since last year for its flagship Huawei P10 series up until the Huawei Mate 30 series, and as of February 2022, Huawei has now added its Huawei P40 lineup into the service.

How the storage upgrade service works is quite simple. Let’s say a user has a Huawei P40 in a 128GB storage configuration. After 1 year, they have realised that 128GB is not enough to store all their apps and media on their phone, and they want to upgrade to 256GB storage without changing their phone. The user can simply visit their nearest Huawei Service Centre in China and pay 559 RMB(USD 88) to get their Huawei P40 128GB upgraded to a 256GB configuration.

Do note that quotations for each device varies, so you may need to visit Huawei’s China website first to get a quotation for your internal storage upgrade before you visit a Huawei Service Centre in China.

For under USD 100, the service also ensures that all of the users data will be transferred over to the new storage drive. This service takes up to an average of 10 days to complete and is currently only available in Chinese markets, not available worldwide.

The service serves as a convenience to those who feel like they are comfortable with their current Huawei phone but wished that their phone supported more storage. Indirectly, the end-user can also save themselves the hassle of searching for a new phone and splurging top dollar to get the phones they want, when they could comfortably settle back on an older flagship that they currently have.

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(Source, Via)

The post You Can Now Double Your Huawei P40 128GB to 256GB in China without buying a new one, here’s how Huawei Does It appeared first on Gizmochina.

UPDATE:

A Xiaomi spokesperson has now dismissed the report by Lithuania’s Defense Ministry saying that they do not restrict or intercept any user behavior:

“Xiaomi has never and will never restrict or block any personal behaviors of our smartphone users, such as searching, calling, web browsing, or the use of third-party communication software,” the statement said. “Xiaomi fully respects and protects the legal rights of all users,” it added.

The spokesperson also emphasized that Xiaomi complies with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Original story follows…

The Defense Ministry of Lithuania recommended that consumers should avoid buying Chinese phones and throw away the ones they already have in the light of a new report that found built-in censorship capabilities on some devices.

The country’s state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday that flagship Xiaomi phones have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms like “Free Tibet,” “Long live Taiwan independence”, or “democracy movement.”

This ability has been turned off for the European Union region on the Xiaomi Mi 10T 5G but still exists nonetheless. However, it can easily be turned on remotely at any time, the Defense Ministry’s National Cyber Security Center said in the report.

A total of 449 terms are possibly being censored by the system apps on Xiaomi devices including the default Internet browser. This list is constantly being updated.

Further, the Xiaomi phone was found to be sending encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore.

Xiaomi did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

“This is important not only to Lithuania but to all countries which use Xiaomi equipment,” the Centre said in the report.

Huawei isn’t free from such flaws either as a security hole was found in the Huawei P40 5G as well. However, Huawei’s representative in the Baltics told the BNS news wire that its phones do not send users’ data to external sources.

No such issues were found on OnePlus though.

Due to all this, Deputy Defense Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters that their “recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible.”

Relations between Lithuania and China have soured lately, especially after China’s demands last month to withdraw Lithuania’s ambassador in Beijing. The country also said that it would recall its envoy to Vilnius after Taiwan announced that its mission in Lithuania would be called the Taiwanese Representative Office.

Taiwanese diplomatic missions in Europe and the United States refer to the city of Taipei in order to avoid referencing the island itself, which China claims as its own.

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