The second-generation Doudou phone is about to hit the table: ZTE isn't picking up its chopsticks—will Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo just sit and watch?
(This article was written by Internet Jianghu and published by TMTPost with authorization)
By Internet Jianghu, Author: Evin, Editor: Liu Zhi Cheng
Over the past two years, the intersection of AI and the smartphone industry has grown increasingly surreal.
On one hand, the buzz around last year’s first-generation Doubao smartphone hasn’t even died down yet, and now the second-generation 'Doubao smartphone'—an AI agent-powered phone—is already on its way.
Moreover, upon closer inspection, the brand leading this launch is Nubia, a subsidiary of ZTE—an 'unconventional player'—giving off strong vibes of a faded star making a comeback.
Next, JumpStart Stellar, another Chinese unicorn company specializing in large AI models, has also announced it will launch its first AI agent-powered smartphone.
Overall, it’s exclusively these peripheral players who are enthusiastically driving the development of AI smartphones.
In contrast, mainstream smartphone brands seem to have gone quiet.
Over the past six months, I’ve attended numerous smartphone launch events, and my overwhelming impression is this:Many leading manufacturers have adopted an extremely calm and conservative stance toward AI smartphones.
Take OPPO, for example: it officially announced as early as 2024 that it had entered the AI smartphone era and has introduced numerous AI-driven feature innovations in recent years. Yet, its rollout in the 'AI smartphone' market has been notably slow and cautious, maintaining an overall conservative stance.
Objectively speaking, however, given the current market environment—where memory prices are rising and sub-$150 smartphones are being sold at a loss—shouldn’t Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo be accelerating their push into AI smartphones?
After all, this is currently the most promising technological innovation capable of stimulating consumer demand and driving new growth for smartphone brands.
If a 'quick-acting lifesaver' is already right in front of them, why are these struggling Chinese smartphone makers remaining so calm?
Or to put it another way, why is the AI smartphone industry experiencing such a paradox—enthusiasm outside the industry but tepid interest within?
This question deserves serious reflection.
In the business world, whether or not to act on something—or how much importance to assign to it—ultimately comes down to where one sits determining what one thinks.
The current divergence in attitudes toward AI smartphones is a clear reflection of this logic: although everyone shares the same ultimate goal, participants occupy different strategic positions within their ecosystems, meaning the competition was destined from the outset to be one of superficial alignment but divergent interests—not a convergence of paths toward a common destination.
Let’s first examine the considerations of the AI camp: 1. Why is ByteDance entering the AI smartphone space?
At its core, it’s about securing a strategic entry point into the AI era.
After all, although Doubao currently leads the market in monthly active users, the development of large AI models as a whole still has a long way to go—and with Qwen, DeepSeek, and others relentlessly closing the gap, who can be certain about how things will turn out in the future?
And more importantly,ByteDance and Doubao’s current AI leadership is 'lopsided,' heavily skewed toward software applications, but they have achieved almost nothing at the hardware entry point level.
This opens up greater opportunities for Alibaba and Tencent to stage a comeback.
For instance, according to data from Tianyancha, in July last year, Alibaba’s Quark officially entered the market with an AI smart glasses product, followed by Qwen AI glasses, DingTalk’s DingTalk A1 series of hardware, and this year’s debut of AutoNavi’s AI robot—collectively weaving a tightly integrated AI ecosystem that combines software and hardware for Alibaba.
As for Tencent, it had previously remained on the sidelines, but recently it has begun leveraging WeChat’s Agent ecosystem and the A2A protocol to connect with various smartphone intelligent assistants, thereby establishing AI access at the mobile hardware entry point.
What about ByteDance? Feishu and Doubao previously collaborated with Anke Innovation and others on some AI hardware initiatives, but these generated limited buzz. Moreover, the Doubao-branded smartphone launched late last year faced severe restrictions—effectively failing before it even got off the ground.
Therefore, ByteDance now needs to break through with an AI smartphone and attempt to carve out a meaningful foothold in the AI hardware market; otherwise,in an era where the entry point equals power, if you can’t hold your seat, your mind will end up serving someone else’s future...
Next, consider Jieyue Xingchen. Although its move into AI smartphones may aim to secure a foothold in hardware entry points, as one of the 'Six Little Dragons' of AI—amid heightened investor attention on Moonshot AI and with companies like Zhipu AI and MiniMax repeatedly setting valuation records—the company's most pressing priority now likely revolves around AI commercialization and preparing for financing or an IPO.
The underlying logic is somewhat similar to when Foxconn announced it would build cars: was the real goal actually to sell vehicles under its own brand? Or to sell AI smartphones?
Not really. It’s more about demonstrating that Foxconn has the contract manufacturing capability to produce cars—and similarly, that Jieyue Xingchen can deliver AI solutions to smartphone makers, thereby gaining access to the smartphone end-user scenario…
This is a path many large AI model players feel compelled to take to prove their worth.
For example, Nanometer AI, under 360 Group, once positioned short-form AI dramas as a commercialization stepping stone;
Similarly, Kunlun Tech’s previously launched TianGong Super Agent heavily promoted the slogan 'the AI version of Office,' aiming to strategically position itself within productivity use cases;
And even Doubao’s current shift to a paid model is fundamentally driven by considerations around AI commercialization.
‘Honestly, if you ask whether our large-model company has the capability to sell AI-powered intelligent solutions—the answer is yes. But frankly speaking, this kind of self-validation now feels more like a reluctant necessity forced upon us.’
“Look at players like MiniMax: outwardly glamorous, yet internally still playing out the same script of ‘high-valuation company, low-revenue business.’ So everyone is scrambling to expand into new application scenarios—to prove they’re not just good at chatting, but can actually turn their models into a viable, revenue-generating business.。”
A commercialization team member from a major AI foundation model company told us: ‘At the end of the day,’This self-validation amounts to trading breadth of use cases for depth of valuation—until this path proves viable, everyone is an emperor wearing new clothes...
Now let’s examine the strategy of the smartphone camp:
1、“ZTE's Nubia and other 'others' represent one category of players. Their aggressive push into AI smartphones fundamentally aims to overtake rivals on a curve—to leverage Doubao as their springboard to become the next Aito in the smartphone industry.
After all, under the conventional approach, with the smartphone industry’s landscape long settled and ossified, players like Nubia face almost no realistic opportunity to break through.
So now,the biggest advantage for ZTE's Nubia and similar players lies in having 'nothing to lose'——since they’ve already been relegated to the 'others' category, and since Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo have inadvertently opened a window of opportunity, why not place a bold bet on AI smartphones and try to turn a bicycle into a motorcycle?
This actually carves out a viable breakout path for tier-three and tier-four players.
This is especially true for Lenovo Mobile: its parent company, Lenovo Group, has already reaped tangible benefits from the current AI wave, so its smartphone business shouldn’t miss out on this盛宴 either. It must continue making significant investments and deeply double down on AI to truly unlock the era-specific premium embedded in its hardware entry point.
2、Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo constitute another category of players. Their defining trait is that while they have laid out strategies for AI smartphones, they aren’t rushing—they’re maintaining a remarkably calm and steady stance overall.
There are multiple reasons for this: First, broadly speaking, smartphones are one of the core pieces of infrastructure in modern society, and Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo are the absolute dominant players in the Chinese market.
Last year alone, these four brands together captured a combined market share of 63.3%, shipping a total of 180 million units.
Given that AI-powered smartphones themselves remain highly immature,these two figures determine that:
Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo cannot rush—they must wait until AI evolves from an unpredictable but clever toy into a sufficiently reliable and deterministic tool before accelerating its implementation.
Otherwise, even a minor technical hiccup could be exponentially amplified into a disaster…
Therefore, for billions of users,this deliberate slowness is actually a sign of responsibility; for smartphone giants, consistent and unremarkable stability will always be preferable to aggressive missteps—avoiding mistakes takes far higher priority than gaining a slight lead…
Second, more narrowly speaking, compared to ‘barefoot’ players like ZTE and Nubia, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo face far more consumers directly. If they hastily launch AI phones before the underlying AI strategy matures, could their brands end up trapped in a generational ‘Doubao phone’-style deadlock?
Moreover, at this stage, every bold claim a brand makes must eventually be repaid through user experience.
If the gap between brand messaging and user experience is too wide—resulting in market feedback that's all thunder and no rain—then this kind of aggressiveness isn't educating the market; it's depleting the brand's trust account in users' minds.
Ultimately,In today’s smartphone industry, AI is a selling point, not a game-changer.
Overemphasizing the latter actually interferes with the accumulation of perception around the former, turning what should be a value-added technological narrative into a liability once expectations go unmet.
A pair of contrasting examples: Take Apple smartphones—everyone complains that Apple’s AI features are mediocre, but has that impacted Apple’s global sales? Not at all. In China alone, it still sold approximately 46.2 million units last year, up 4.0% year-over-year.
Then there’s Honor, which declared AI its strategic core very early on—but did that propel the brand to new sales heights?
Apparently not. According to IDC Consulting, it even dropped out of China’s top five smartphone vendors ranking last year…
Third—and more practically—having AI agents perform real tasks consumes far more tokens than simple large-model Q&A. So who will bear the token consumption costs for today’s AI phones?
Doubao Phone dared to pioneer this path earlier, essentially trading short-term losses for strategic positioning.It embodies a strategic intent to seize the AI hardware entry point, offering long-term ecosystem value—thus allowing it to operate without immediate cost constraints.
Yet even so, Doubao has already introduced a paid membership model to hedge against rising cost pressures.
For larger players like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, if they can't clearly calculate this cost in advance, who could possibly afford the token consumption costs at a scale of hundreds of millions of users?
Therefore, the collective caution shown by Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo is less about conservatism and more a reflection of sober commercial rationality.
3. Honor stands in a category of its own.This is primarily because Honor had already unveiled its Alpha Strategy and laid the groundwork for AI integration well before the recent surge in interest around AI-powered smartphones.
Overall, this move aims not only to break through in the brand’s market position but may also be laying the groundwork for a potential future IPO…
However, as previously mentioned, the full impact of Honor's current AI strategy does not yet appear to have materialized.
In March last year, Honor officially launched its Alpha Strategy—marking the first major initiative under Li Jian, its new CEO, who took office in January.
Yet in the same year, Honor disappeared from the top-five rankings of smartphone shipments reported by IDC (for the domestic market) and Counterpoint Research (globally), being reclassified into the 'others' category…
Of course,This isn’t necessarily an indication that Honor’s AI efforts are lacking; rather, it seems more likely that the company is still catching up on ecosystem development it previously neglected.
For instance, a recent job posting updated on Honor’s official website shows that Honor Terminal Co., Ltd. is currently recruiting an 'Input Method Android Development Expert.'
Developing an input method in the AI era actually illustrates one thing:
Honor is indeed building an AI ecosystem as part of its strategic roadmap, systematically addressing past weaknesses, accumulating user data assets, and enhancing end-to-end AI service experiences to create a tighter user loop.
However, tactically speaking, because it missed the window to develop its own input method earlier, the cost of playing catch-up now is magnified significantly by the passage of time...
It is evident thatIn the business world, aggressiveness and caution aren’t matters of superiority or inferiority—they’re simply optimal solutions to the same equation under different constraints.
Take Dreame as an example: its aggressive moves in the first half of this year were aimed at securing industrial fund support, while its more conservative stance in the second half reflects a strategic focus.
At their core, these are all decisions driven by vested interests—adaptive shifts of the same survival algorithm across different cycles.
The divergent stances within the AI smartphone industry are essentially an amplified manifestation of this strategic adaptation—some must charge ahead to claim cognitive high ground, while others need to adopt a wait-and-see approach to safeguard their core business.
Different perspectives reveal distinct underlying interests.
And therein lies the true allure of business: it never penalizes the choice itself, only the mismatch between a choice and its context...
In hindsight, this divergence over AI phones—often framed as a battle of strategic paths—is better understood as a concrete manifestation of differing philosophies about timing:
Some believe 'to move first is to win,' placing bets on the contours of the future amid uncertainty; others adhere to 'steadiness ensures longevity,' accumulating momentum within certainty to endure cyclical shifts.
Both postures represent the necessary growing pains—and glories—of an industry in its adolescence.
Deep integration between AI and hardware has never been a sudden paradigm shift, but rather a protracted evolutionary process demanding patience, experimentation, and course correction.
Today’s 'radical' approaches will eventually settle into tomorrow’s common sense, just as today’s 'cautious' stances will, when the time ripens, transform into poised, long-built momentum.
When token costs eventually become negligible, when intelligent agents evolve from toys into tools, and when every smartphone truly becomes the user’s 'digital avatar'—looking back from that future vantage point, we’ll realize it was precisely this temperature gap between insiders and outsiders, this alternating tension between hot enthusiasm and cool restraint, that kept the industry from collective mania or collective silence.
It functions like an invisible scale: one pan lifts the sharp edge of innovation, while the other anchors the foundation of reality—ensuring AI phones neither soar so high they lose gravity nor sink so low they fall into obscurity.
Thus, what everyone anticipates isn’t a singular, dominant 'AI moment' led by one company, but a layered, coexisting 'AI era.'
On this path of exploration, there are no standard answers—only continuously rewritten problem-solving processes.
And all participants—whether enthusiastic or reserved, early movers or late adopters—are each contributing, in their own way, an indispensable stroke toward a tomorrow that has yet to be named…
Risk Disclaimer: The above content only represents the author's view. It does not represent any position or investment advice of Futu. Futu makes no representation or warranty.Read more
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