The most important phones of the year have already been announced, but one company might still be able to pique our interest. Huawei unveiled its AI-focused Kirin 970 processor at IFA, saying the chip's real world benefits would be shared at the launch of its next flagship. Now, the company is ready to reveal how the Kirin 970 performs in a phone. The Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro were designed around AI -- so much so that Huawei wants to call them "intelligent machines." We don't know how much these intelligent machines will cost yet, but Huawei told Engadget to expect the prices to be competitive.

The next big thing in phones: high-end handsets that harness artificial intelligence to drive advanced features like smart photography, machine translation, and predictive behavior. While we're waiting for the Pixel 2 and the iPhone X to show up in the stores, Huawei has joined the AI fray with its new handset, the Mate 10 Pro. This is the company's first smartphone with a chip tuned to power artificial-intelligence software. Inside the phone's new Kirin 970 processor (which Huawei designed and built itself) is a component the Chinese manufacturer calls the Neural Processing Unit, and it's this corner of the phone's brains that fuels the machine-learning features. I spent some time with the new Mate 10, and the function where I could most clearly spot some intelligent behavior is the Translate app, which offers offline translation between different languages.

Huawei's new Mate 10 Pro takes aim squarely at Samsung, Google and Apple with a large screen, competition-beating big battery and AI baked in. The Mate 10 Pro is the latest in third-largest smartphone manufacturer Huawei's big-screen line, which has become popular for its battery life and multitasking prowess. The new top-end Huawei features a 6in, 18:9 elongated OLED screen, matching its Samsung rivals with tiny bezels at the side, top and bottom, which are only just big enough to fit the front-facing camera and sensors at the top and company logo at the bottom. The back of the phone is curved glass, with metal sides that feel significantly more premium than previous Mate smartphones, matching the level of build-quality and design of rivals. "The Mate 10 shows Huawei can now produce devices that can really compete with the quality of flagship devices like Apple," said Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at research firm IDC.

SoftBank and Huawei jointly demonstrated various use cases for their forthcoming 5G network. With 5G technology, getting and staying connected will get easier. You'll still need a robust network provider but your devices will learn to do things like sync or pair automatically. When 5G comes online, around 50 billion "things" will be connected and that number will be growing exponentially. Think of self-driving cars that have capabilities to communicate with traffic lights, smart city sensor systems, savvy home appliances, industrial automation systems, connected health innovations, personal drones, robots and more.

Samsung may be looking to take on the iPhone X in 2018 by introducing a 3D image mapping sensor to the front camera of the Galaxy S9, tech informant, Ice Universe Tweeted Thursday. If true, this could indicate Samsung plans to make its facial recognition a lot more like Apple's. While Samsung released the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 with Face Unlock and iris scanning, the features have proven not be the safest biometrics security measures. Meanwhile, Apple claims its Face ID feature on the iPhone X has a one in a million chance of being spoofed. This claim hasn't yet been tested as Apple has so refrained from allowing the press to share official opinions on the device with several weeks left until its market launch.

Meet Zia Chishti, the person who likes to show his investors that Pakistan is safe and they need to understand the country to understand his company. Recently, Chishti embarked off a helicopter- skiing his way downhill in the northern snow capped peaks of Pakistan, with the aim to convince investors, clients and CEOs that the nation that was once recalled by the economist as'the world's most dangerous place' is officially safe for business and everyday living. Chishti, gathered a group from several countries including Alessandro Benetton, a heir to a billionaire family and owner to the iconic Italian clothing company, and Huawei Technologies Co. rotating CEO Guo Ping earlier this year in Pakistan. An Afiniti ski group enjoys the Karakoram mountain range. Last month, his artificial intelligence company -Afiniti- signed a deal with Huawei.

Two new Pixel phones and a competitor to Amazon's Echo Dot are among the products expected to be unveiled today at an event held by Google. The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL phones will be iterations of the first Pixel phones released a year ago, according to leaks, while the Google Home Mini smart speaker is expected to be similar to Amazon's shrunk-down Echo Dot smart speaker, squeezing the voice-control features into a smaller package but requiring a separate speaker for high-quality music playback. It appears the phones are part of the company doubling down its efforts to compete directly with Apple in smartphone hardware. Additionally, they will continue to provide Google the opportunity to demonstrate the extent of its software prowess when freed from the requirement to work closely with other Android device manufacturers. These are the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL https://t.co/cXCs560jNH

If virtual assistants have been the breakthrough technology in this year's smartphone software, then the AI processor is surely the equivalent on the hardware side. Apple has taken to calling its latest SoC the A11 Bionic on account of its new AI "Neural Engine". Huawei's latest Kirin 970 boasts a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and is billing its upcoming Mate 10 as a "real AI phone". Samsung's next Exynos SoC is rumored to feature a dedicated AI chip too. Qualcomm has actually been ahead of the curve since opening up the Hexagon DSP (digital signal processor) inside its Snapdragon flagships to heterogeneous compute and neural networking SDKs a couple of generations ago.

Now here's something you weren't expecting from Amazon's Alexa-themed event: a device dedicated to those still using landlines. The just-unveiled Echo Connect serves as an intelligent speakerphone that lets you make land-based phone calls using only your voice. It uses your existing phone number and will even let you dial 911 hands-free -- important if you've injured yourself and can't reach a handset (yes, Amazon is clearly accounting for the "I've fallen and I can't get up" scenario). The Connect is available to pre-order today for $35, and it'll reach the US in the fourth quarter. Calls from the US to Canada and Mexico will be free, Amazon says. British and German buyers will have to wait until sometime in early 2018.

There is growing concern in some quarters of the media about the misuse of the term artificial intelligence as a mere buzzword, as little more than the newest way to market a company's products or image, an issue I discussed in an interview in leading Spanish daily El País after participating in an OECD forum on the topic in Paris last June. Make no mistake: artificial intelligence in general and machine learning in particular will be one of the major drivers in technology in the coming years: the ability of an unsupervised algorithm to learn from data will allow us to do things beyond our current understanding when it comes to tackling stable, highly predictable problems and where it is reasonably easy to collect large amounts of data. At the same time, let's be clear: we're not talking here about machines capable of thinking as such, rather the ability to create products that make a competitive difference for companies with the right managers. Who are the right managers? Definitely, not the kind that believe that artificial intelligence can simply be bought and installed, or worse, those who see it as a marketing buzzword.