Having a major tech company behind your brand is often considered a good thing, but it may be the saving grace for Chinese mobile phone brand Honor, which was recently sold by Huawei to a new Chinese consortium. Huawei decided to sell off the Honor brand as a means of solving its supply chain problems with chip manufacturers following its ongoing US blacklisting, thus allowing Honor to make use of other chip manufacturers.
Although Huawei was able to bring its high standard of engineering to the Honor phones–which were considerably less premium in comparison–its biggest Achilles heel has been the current US ban which has prevented the company from using Google services.
Honor announced its first new post-Huawei V40 5G flagship phone which is first being released directly into China before eventually making its way to the rest of the world. The new V40 will feature a 6.72-inch OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ processor. The phone comes with 8GB and two different storage options, one for 128GB (R8500) and another at 256GB (R9500).
Those are decent specs for a phone like this and the brief images shown about the device show that it retains the high quality of engineering it had developed from Huawei. Other features on the phone include a 1/1.56-inch 50-megapixel sensor in the main camera and a 4,000mAh battery that can be charged wirelessly at 50W or at 66W with a cable.
We don’t know much else about these new phones and whether the move to a new company has affected them in any sort of way and while these first Chinese models won’t come with Google’s important Play Store, there is technically nothing stopping them from releasing to global markets with that all-important Google ecosystem and have the availability of thousands of useful apps.
Last Updated: January 22, 2021
