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Collaborations between smartphone camera manufacturers aren’t anything new. We’ve seen Leica labels on Huawei phones, the Zeiss logo on Sony and Nokia handsets and Motorola used to offer a Hasselblad-branded camera module for its Moto Z series. It’s often difficult to tell if the teamwork is mostly marketing-driven or actually happening on an engineering level but one thing is clear: smartphone manufacturers like the logo of a big-name camera brand on their devices.
Chinese company Xiaomi has so far (as far as we know) worked without the help of a big name in the camera business, but it appears this could be about to change. The company launched a survey on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, asking users which camera company it should collaborate with.
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| Image: Weibo |
Options included Hasselblad, Canon and Nikon. The ‘vote’ was won by Hasselblad. There is, of course, no way of knowing if we’ll see a Xiaomi phone with Hasselblad-branded camera anytime soon but out of three camera manufacturers, it would be the most logical choice. It’s the only one with previous experience in the mobile business (through the Hasselblad True Zoom module) and has previously collaborated with other manufacturers in the camera category. In any case, we’d hope a company like Xiaomi does not base strategic business decisions solely on social media surveys.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)