Oneplus and Tencent: Exploring China's technological revolution - BBC Click

[Music] this week a phone is born and we're exclusively behind the scenes can artificial intelligence block the bullies and driving monsters [Music] just across the water from Hong Kong on the Chinese mainland lies a city at the heart of the country's technological revolution welcome back to Shenzhen this is where stuff gets made when you think of China's electronic scene this might be what you think of thousands of factories and millions of people mass producing billions of devices more than 70% of the world's mobile phones are manufactured in China their components also made locally a source from the city's famous giant electronics markets where everything is for sale but all that industry is taking its toll on the city as the buildings go up to accommodate the influx of businesses the smog has come down to remind everyone of the price you pay for a rapidly expanding industrial economy the middle class here is also consuming more power as well as demanding something else good quality homegrown products and Chinese brands are rising to the challenge with names like ZTE Xiaomi and Huawei even breaking out of China and becoming recognized and desired worldwide one such brand is one plus now despite only being four years old it's already turned out a number of phones that have been compared favorably to the top-end Samsung's and iPhones and this week it unveiled a brand new handset the five t with all the fanfare that a big phone launch gets these days are y'all excited the secrecy that surrounds these new phones pre-launch is intense and let's be honest it's part of the hype look it's another black rectangle but as such it's really rare to get a look behind the scenes at the design the manufacture and the launch of a new device but in Shenzhen two weeks before the unveiling we were given exclusive access to the inner workings of the production line on the run-up to d-day now I am qualified to serve you pastries they make loads of different types of phones in this Factory so to keep the five tier secret from all the other workers everything happens behind the blue shroud of secrecy are you ready thank you come in [Music] welcome to production line 27 the phone starts life is just a tiny camera there and then it's gradually assembled around this u-shaped production line which means by the time it gets to the end it's a fully featured phone just about there this is the reason China has come to dominate electronics manufacturing a ready supply of a disciplined relatively low-cost workforce each person here has one unique job which requires concentration speed and precision a single speck of dust caught in the camera lens and the finished phone will be rejected what I found most surprising about this is it's all people I would have thought with this kind of high precision job these phones would have been built solely by machine but pretty much each line can produce more than 90 phones an hour it's exhausting just watching this fortunately the staff get a two-hour lunch break and also suddenly at 3 p.m. this might look weird but having seen how intensive this job is and how much concentration you need this 10-minute I break is invaluable I think if I was doing this skill I just want 10 minutes to kind of get my head down and close my eyes and reset my brain - now these people are bringing to life a design that has been anguished over squeezed for efficiency and ultimately compromised to keep costs down I'm meeting with one of the designers to get the inside track on how he's made this black rectangle ever so slightly different from all the others for every new phone you come up with lots and lots of different designs like this few hundreds oh my word do you think we've we've achieved peak design now in the end these are all physics so um what interferes with that what does not is is something that you think they can't change we are still making some choices some sacrifices in favor of the beauty of a little bit such as well such as actually the best place for this would be actually leaning directly on the corner in our design we have this angle here so this does not allow us to directly put this right here if you could get rid of one part of the file - my eel camera part better what would it be oh it maybe the show back at the factory Simon would be horrified by what happens to his design this is where an unlucky few phones are pulled off the production line to chec extreme tolerance no no with a freeze the components will be no shaking a little bit right elsewhere other test phones escaped that big plunge but instead a dropped five thousand times each others have their charging ports wiggled and buttons pressed 10,000 times and then there's the tumble dryer only when about 70 percent of the sample phones start surviving this vigorous testing will it build be deemed successful for me this is a fascinating look at how a phone is born and now that it's being launched this small pre production line can expand once the company has an indication of how many orders it get and that's the secret not to produce more than you can sell so when oneplus decided to take on the big brands which can all afford to fail it decided to sell its first phone by invitation only what was the thinking behind that because I would have tried to make it as available as possible so being a brand new company and you know not making such a complicated product as a smartphone and being based here we didn't really have the opportunity to test the product in all the countries where we sold it and adding to that we didn't know how many phones to make if you end up having too many phones in your warehouse that you can't sell it's over with the launch over one plus will nervously await the first reviews and more importantly the advance orders and they will decide whether these people will be joined by hundreds more or not [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week that US Bop makers Boston Dynamics shut off this horrifyingly agile backflipping monster what Facebook announced it's testing out a trust indicator to help stop fake news and Mario could be destined for Hollywood Nintendo are in talks with the animation studio behind Despicable Me about bringing the gaming legend to the big screen let's hope it was better than last time video games publisher EA was in hot water this week with its Star Wars Battlefront 2 title to unlock top characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader gamers originally had to pay large sums of credits purchasable either with a real cash or earned by spending tens of hours playing due to complaints ea initially reduced the number needed by 75% but as now put a hold on all real world transactions and finally in competition with Amazon and Google Chinese search engine giant Baidu revealed its own voice controlled smart speaker The Raven H has a detachable remote that comes with an LED display and so you can see that wherever you are in the room there's a robotic arm version too [Music] the UK's anti-bullying week is now coming to an end but behind closed doors computer screens and even smartphones the bullying that some encountering the school playground still lives on after hours after I did come out I then received online anonymous messages from an account set up to message me telling me I should kill myself because obviously they didn't agree with my sexuality it destroyed me because not only was the bullying happen at school it followed me to my home it follow me to my room my safe space the place that I feel happy the place that I am myself I suddenly couldn't be anymore Thomas move schools and went on to become one of Facebook's anti-bullying ambassadors a scheme funded by the social network to train up pupils to provide peer-to-peer support within secondary schools it's really important to have someone there because it's someone they know they can come to as well and with the ambassadors be in their generation children and well at least come to us and know that they're there for them because we're their age we have similar interest so they can come to us much easier but with so many different places to communicate the problem it's hard to police hard to monitor and hard to sold as those at the frontline of dealing with cyberbullying a test as the big and small players try to overcome the issue one british company has big ambitions they want to get their software on every single child's device before they use it for the first time safe to net don't like to refer to their software as parental control because they feel that that could put people off some of the functions though could be considered that for example monitoring the amount of time that your children are online and limiting that however you see fit you can block devices you can block websites but it also is planning on upping the game of what these sort of products can do by adding a bit of artificial intelligence by later this year it's going to be aiming to start to track the behavioural changes so that they can preempt any bullying before it actually happened it aims to understand context providing triggered alerts for parents rather than letting them actually spy so one of the ways that we identify when children are trending sad and maybe even depressed is that they stop posting selfies of themselves because they've lost that self-confidence so our software is designed to be able to pick up those trends and recognize again there's a change in behavioral pattern so we're identifying cyberbullying abuse aggression sextortion grooming and other predatory risks great if it works but of course it's all really about human behavior culturally we do have an issue that young people believe that you can behave this way online we need to celebrate their message you don't and I think it takes all of us to work together educators parents and tech companies to make sure that children understand that so wealth none of the solutions may be foolproof maybe these ideas together could make cyberbullying a less a problem in the future than it is today [Music] Apple has been massively popular here in China but that popularity has started to wane and that's mainly thanks to an increase in good quality food Chinese smartphones now that was a problem for the thousands of small businesses here which have become dependent on China's obsession with iPhones dan Vincent has spent some time with one of the country's unofficial Genius Bar workshops who become dependent on Apple's success no waiting and one fun are migrant workers from southern China ten years ago they moved to Beijing to join China's tech boom for this family-run business their fortunes are linked to the rise and fall in popularity of the Apple iPhone they fix more than ten thousand iPhones a year we can basically fix every problem big or small we fix Apple products our main business is to upgrade iPhone storage we have been seeing lots of customers many of them don't want to change a phone yet but they want to upgrade the storage China and Apple have had an on-and-off relationship this is the second biggest market for the American tech firm but Apple has lost much of its luster in China until recently the company faced back-to-back declining sales its losing ground to Chinese competitors other brands have taken certain market share from Apple that's why Apple sales aren't that great anymore a lot worse than before one possibility is that it's much more expensive than Chinese brands sir coyote woman one time CTO at the same time Chinese brands are also made well of good quality so many people choose Chinese brands 300 entire general of what hazards issue this means fewer customers for one fun it's just too expensive iPhone 8 is the same as iPhone 7 the only difference is wireless charging others are more or less the same so iPhone 8 isn't popular iPhone 7 isn't that popular either Apple generates 25% of its profit in China the launch of the iPhone 10 marks a return to growth in the country but Chinese made apps are dominating the markets apple has struggled to integrate into China's ecosystem many users are now opting for cheaper Chinese brands equipped with high-end features people in cities that have low consumption for tier cities or cities below would choose Chinese brands cheap phones mostly like the countryside iron people tend to buy low-end phones like oh boo boo boo growl Bihar way the fifth best selling phone in China but now Chinese brands are aggressively moving into the international markets I feel some brands Chinese brands are selling overseas for example Huawei phones are being sold to foreign countries they are quite good two years ago China was expected to overtake the u.s. becoming Apple's biggest market workers like Lil Wayne are hedging their bets how big a market share Apple is going to take in China is difficult to predict if Apple can keep its system and its looks at the same time change to be more attractive to customers it will still have quite a big market share no one can live without a phone so if you work in the phone industry you will have a market even back when China was just known for manufacturing other countries devices it was still growing some pretty strong tech brands to serve its own enormous population take WeChat it's an app used by nearly 900 million people here in China now it's a bit like whatsapp but you can do so much more with it you can order a taxi or a food delivery you can even take partners but I'm dating tinder style but what's amazing is where you might struggle to use a credit card here even the smallest shops will accept payments through WeChat even when they don't take cash this is the easiest peer-to-peer payment system I think I've seen to pay someone else you just get WeChat to generate a QR code which the other person's scans and the money is transferred from your account to theirs behind WeChat is one of China's biggest tech companies $0.10 probably the biggest company that you've never heard of and just like Facebook Google and the like in the West 10 cent is racing to develop ways to try to make sense and make use of all the interactions words and pictures that are shared on the service every second the brand new artificial intelligence lab here in Shenzhen is full of young minds trying to apply machine learning research to understanding images and they're coming up with similar results to those that we've seen previously from companies in the West here's an app that's learning how to identify different objects in a picture at the moment just rectangular books but here's one which tries to work out what you're wearing presumably so it can sell you more of the same you see as soon as you can isolate objects within the image you can give them special treatments now that could be for novelty reasons a bit like what we see snapchat do or for more useful things like intelligently applying different effects to different parts of the image maybe to darken the background and lighten the subject in a video chat its faces that are surely the most important parts of the picture by spotting and isolating them they can be turned into 3d models which might form your avatar for times when the video link won't work in fact they're working on the whole body here identifying limbs and joints which can also form part of a 3d reconstruction just don't ask to see the raw data hmm delightful and four times when the video is not clear or it's too compressed here's some work to increase the resolution adding back in missing detail by looking for clues for what was lost over several frames of video but this lab aims to go further than just understanding the images on our social feeds you can suppose lots in them feed on them either before the plane was invented people couldn't imagine a time when humans could fly only after its invention we now understand that it is possible so the same needs to happen with AI instead of just simply improving efficiency of what we can do today we need a big breakthrough that will go beyond our imagination and if nothing else has impressed you then here's a new feature which will analyze your photos write a description of them and then wrap them yes wrap them word to your mother it seems that $0.10 is working really hard to catch up with the West exploring ai's applications in lots of areas at once these lunchtime power naps are commonplace here in China and probably necessary to enable workers to keep working late into the evening and they'll certainly need a lot of energy because $0.10 is trying to break out of China it's bought a stake in snapchat and also in Tesla which is its self working heavily on image processing to help its fleet of semi autonomous cars to understand the world around them and I'm not just talking about semi autonomous cars no Tesla now has a new truck he is Dave Lee in Los Angeles you've really got to hand it to Elan musk when people are telling him he can't do something or that he's doing too much what does he do he goes and launches an enormous electric truck here it is the Tesla semi he says it will go 500 miles on a single charge carrying the heaviest load allowed in the US roads it will do nought to 60 miles per hour in 20 seconds on the left the thing that looks like it's not moving is a diesel truck as you might expect it comes filled with a host of Tesla technology including autonomy this thing will change lanes on its own now a diesel truck is twice as expensive as it has a semi if you move from diesel to electricity which is significantly cheaper those cost will be significantly cheaper and these trucks could pay for themselves in just a couple of years in theory other companies are trying to pull off the electric truck Cummins is a truck firm that has been around for more than a hundred years and it unveiled its own electric truck recently but that one only has a range of a hundred miles per charge of no interest to any serious trucker in classic Steve Jobs style Elon Musk had one more thing to the tears of faithful so the Tesla fans that came here today certainly expected to see a lorry well they weren't expecting to see was a new roaster and that certainly got this energetic crowd extremely excited the bad news for Tesla fans is that the Roadster won't be on the road until 2020 [Music] and that's it's from China for the moments there was absolutely no doubt that we will be back here pretty soon in the meantime you can catch all the backstage fun and photos on Facebook and on Twitter at BBC click thanks for watching see you soon [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 1,357,103

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, bbc news, bbc world, bbc news channel, spencer kelly, china, tencent, one plus, phone, smartphone, technology, electronics, apple, iphone, tesla, bullying, elon musk, augmented reality, virtual reality

Id: kwD3MUtZxeE

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017