NokiaOnlines - The year is 2025. An unassuming event shocked the tech world. It was not a huge Apple keynote. It was not a Samsung product spectacle. It was a quiet release from a smaller player. Nubia, a ZTE brand, released a phone. They called it an "engineering prototype." It was the M153. It was powered by ByteDance's Doubao large-language model.

Only 30,000 units were available. They sold out in minutes. The frenzy quickly moved to second-hand platforms. Scalpers and tech enthusiasts started bidding wildly. The price of this moderately-priced Android phone skyrocketed. It reached an astonishing 36,000 yuan. That is roughly $5,000. It was the price of fear. It was the price of true disruption. Traditional phone makers should be terrified. The AI phone era has officially begun.

Nokia Phone
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The New Energy Moment for Mobile

The comparison is simple but brutal. The rise of AI phones is like the New Energy Vehicle (NEV) moment. It is not just a change in power source. It is a complete reconstruction of the underlying logic. Smartphones replaced feature phones years ago. Now, AI phones are here to replace the smartphone. This is not an incremental update. This is a fundamental shift.

Luo Yonghao, the founder of Smartisan Technology, is a prominent voice. He issued a rare, high-profile warning. He spoke directly to the traditional giants. These companies are only "making incremental improvements at a snail's pace". They are like "toothpaste giants." They must prioritize AI phones soon. If not, they face a complete collapse. The AI revolution is now heading straight for their cash registers.

The Doubao Shockwave: $5,000 for a Prototype

Why the massive hype? The Doubao phone is an intelligent "AI human". It aims to understand the user better than the user understands themselves. It can make choices for you. Think about your current phone. It is full of fragmented apps. You do "digital chores" constantly. You open one app for maps, another for a playlist, another for a bank transfer.

The AI phone changes everything. It combines tasks across apps seamlessly. It is a true, all-in-one agent. People ditched search engines when large-language models (LLMs) emerged. They will likely abandon today's mainstream smartphones for the same reason. That is the $5,000 bet. People are paying a fortune for a prototype because they see the future.

Apple's Perfectionism: A Curse in the AI Era

The biggest question hangs over Apple. Will the iPhone be the next Nokia? Nokia was once the undisputed king. Its hardware was perfect. Its software was smooth and reliable. But it missed the smartphone wave. Now, Apple's weakness is its pathological pursuit of perfection. This was its winning strategy in the hardware era. It is a major curse in the AI era.

AI is a wild, rapidly evolving field. It grows through "emergence," "hallucinations," and "evolution through mistakes". Apple's meticulous approach is too slow. It insists on releasing things only when they are perfect. Competitors are moving at light speed. A single day in the AI era is like a year in the past. Wait a few hundred days, and competitors will be far ahead of Apple.

Apple only launched its intelligent system in 2024. They branded it as "Apple + Intelligence". Yet, Siri still acts like a "dumb assistant". It can set an alarm. It can check the weather. That is about it. The full-fledged, truly intelligent "Apple Intelligence" is not expected until 2026. That is a lifetime in the AI market.

The market has noticed the lag. Time magazine named eight "AI Architects" as its Person of the Year. The list included Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk. Apple had no place on this list. This is the true sign of crisis. The market recognizes the new power brokers. They are LLM companies. They are chip makers. They are not the current hardware kings.

Second-tier phone manufacturers are striking deals. Doubao partnered with Nubia. DeepSeek could partner with someone else. Internet giants with LLMs—Alibaba and Tencent—will be tempted. Tencent could launch an AI phone integrating all its social and payment products. That would be a truly complete AI experience.

Time is running out for Apple and Samsung. They must transform quickly. They cannot remain "hardware manufacturers." They must become "intelligent service providers". Otherwise, their once-proud, closed-off ecosystem barriers will become their prisons. When your phone becomes a genuine AI human, one question remains: Will you be more free, or less?

Source: eu.36kr.com/



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