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Huawei’s budget-friendly Honor View 10 ships March 23rd
Huawei's Honor View 10 is positioned as a budget-friendly alternative to high-priced mobile phones. Our hands-on described it as a "OnePlus-style flagship that won't break the bank," while also calling it a "serious contender." Now you can pre-order the handset for $499 with a shipping date of March 23rd.
Honor's mid-range 7X with 18:9 display is now on sale for $200
Honor spilled the proverbial beans on its new mid-range 7X smartphone a few weeks back, but kept mum on pricing and availability at the time. As expected, it was saving that piece of the puzzle to announce at its London event today. In the US, the Honor 7X is now available to pre-order for $200 for mid-December delivery, which makes the £270 UK and €300 European prices (shipping immediately in some territories) seem downright unfair, even if they're more or less what you'd typically pay for a mid-range handset. While it doesn't break the bank in any region, you have to remember the phone lacks a few features some might consider essential, like waterproofing, fast-charging and NFC for mobile payments. What you are primarily paying for, then, is the slim-bezeled, 5.93-inch, 18:9 display with a 2,160 x 1,080, so your interest in the device will no doubt be entirely dependent on what features you consider a priority.
Honor squeezed more screen into its budget View 10 flagship
When Huawei sub-brand Honor revealed its new Honor 7X a few weeks ago, we weren't exactly thrilled. You can only squeeze so many thrills out of a big screen and a mid-range chipset, after all. Thankfully, that wasn't the only device Honor has been working on. Honor's deal has always been about delivering solid performance on a budget, but it's getting a bit more ambitious with the new View 10 (known as the V10 in China). Huawei and Honor are seemingly intent on building a OnePlus-style flagship that won't break the bank, and if a little hands-on time is anything to go on, the View 10 is already shaping up to be a serious contender.
Honor’s 7X is a big, unremarkable mid-range phone
It's no wonder Huawei's been the third-biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world for so long now. The company releases so many of the things, it's hard to keep track. Following Huawei's recent launch of the Mate 10, it's now sub-brand Honor's turn to welcome a new device to its ranks: the Honor 7X. It's designed to succeed the now year-old 6X, which offered dual-camera tricks at a mid-range price. The 7X has a key selling point of its own too, in the form of a big ol' 5.93-inch "FullView" display.
Honor returns to Moto G territory with the £150 6A
Huawei sub-brand Honor has released a powerful flagship and interesting mid-ranger in the past few months, so it's headed back to wallet-friendly, entry-level territory for its next European launch. The Honor 6A is more or less what you expect from a £150 handset these days: A 5-inch, 720p display, octa-core Snapdragon 430 chip, 2 gigs of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage and 13MP/5MP cameras.
The Honor 9 is a cheaper, smaller flagship
Slowly, Honor is making a name for itself producing cut-price phones with seriously competitive specs. An offshoot of Huawei, the experimental brand repackages the parts -- hardware and software -- refined by its corporate sibling, before assessing and undercutting its rivals significantly. For the budget-conscious customer, it's a tempting offer. Today, Honor is revealing its latest handset for Europe, the Honor 9, which continues that trend. It's a replacement for the Honor 8 and boasts a spec sheet similar to the Honor 8 Pro, which my colleague Jamie Rigg was smitten with earlier this year. The phone differs in two key areas, though: size and price.
The Honor 8 Pro is Huawei's best flagship yet
There's Huawei, and then there's Honor. While both are technically the same company, the Honor brand takes some of the best bits of Huawei's smartphones and packages them up in new devices that don't take as much of a bite out of your bank account. That's been the general distinction between the two, anyway, but the line has become blurrier as Honor has begun breaching the mid-range with smartphones like the Honor 8. And now, it's been all but scrubbed out with the announcement of the £475 (nearly $593) Honor 8 Pro today, which is every bit a new Huawei flagship.
Huawei announces a 360-degree VR camera for smartphones (updated)
Huawei is joining the 360-degree camera war. The Chinese electronics company has revealed that it created a 360-degree clip-on for smartphones called Honor VR Camera in collaboration with Insta360 at an event in Beijing. Huawei is keeping its pricing and release date a secret, but it's obviously part of the company's online-focused line. The phonemaker also said the device is capable of 3K photography and seamless livestreaming. Plus, you can capture and share photos and videos as well as do livestreams through its companion app.
It's no longer enough for budget phones to just be cheap
Two years ago, the world of smartphones looked very different. It was hard to find a decent phone for less than $500, batteries took forever to charge, and screens were generally smaller than five inches. These days, you can get a long-lasting 5.2-inch (or larger) phone with speedy performance and the latest operating system for $400. Heck, you can even get one for $200.
The Honor 6x does the iPhone's portrait trick for $250
Smartphones with dual cameras are about to become the norm now that Apple has jumped aboard the bandwagon. And they're about to spread to more-affordable phones too. Budget phone maker Honor has just unveiled the $250 Honor 6x, which the company says is the first smartphone "in its price range" to sport two cameras on the rear. After a few days with a preview unit, I found the Honor 6x decent for the price, with its dual-camera setup in particular delivering mostly effective results.
Honor Magic tucks Huawei's latest smarts into a slab of glass
Huawei is probably best known for its Leica-branded smartphones aimed at high-end users, but its e-commerce brand Honor has also been busy entertaining affordable markets with some surprisingly nice devices -- namely the 8 and the Note 8. To wrap up the year, today the company announced the Honor Magic to showcase some of its latest goodies. "This is an experimental product of ours," said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer Business Group. "This concept phone will help us pre-evaluate uncertain future technologies." In a nutshell, the Magic is a mix of fresh design, faster charging tech, smarter assistant and interesting improvements on other aspects of user experience.
Honor's latest dual-camera smartphone comes to Europe
After Asia, Europe is typically the next destination for new devices from Huawei's Honor brand. Though the new Honor 8 was recently announced for the US market (read our full hands-on here), the smartphone is actually launching first in Europe, where it's available today for €399, or £370 if you hail from the UK. The handset may look significantly different to Huawei's flagship P9, but there are more than a few similarities on the spec sheet. A 5.2-inch, 1080p display, for example, as well as a dual 12-megapixel camera arrangement (one RGB sensor, one monochrome) and 8MP front-facer.
Huawei's Honor Note 8 packs a huge 6.6-inch screen
Honor might be a Huawei sub-brand, but it's definitely taking the spotlight today. It's introducing the Honor Note 8, an upper-mid-range behemoth meant to take on the likes of Xiaomi's Mi Max. Its focal point is undoubtedly its 6.6-inch, 2,560 x 1,440 screen -- it's both larger and sharper than its Xiaomi rival, and clearly built for people whose smartphone might be their only computing device. You won't get an exotic camera setup like on the Huawei P9 (there's 'just' one rear 13-megapixel camera with stabilization). However, you will get the P9's Kirin 955 octa-core processor as well as a hefty 4GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel front camera, a fingerprint reader, a sizeable 4,500mAh battery and 32GB, 64GB or 128GB of expandable storage.
Huawei's $80 smartwatch isn't worth it
You remember that adage about how if you want something cheap, fast and good, you can only get two? I'm too drunk to recall it properly, but Huawei's doing its best to tick all three boxes with the Honor Band Z1. It's a wearable from the company's Honor sub-brand that's designed to appeal to tech-savvy, budget-conscious shoppers. It's just gone on sale in the US for $80 and, up front, it's far too much for a neat but badly executed idea. It might be $20 less than the discounted OG Pebble and significantly more stylish, but the experience is so compromised that it's not worth the pain.
Huawei's first Honor phone for the US goes on sale January 31st
Huawei's Honor brand teased that it would land in the US this year, and it's making good on its word: the company will officially begin selling the Honor 5X on American shores tomorrow, January 31st. It's a pretty solid deal, at first blush. For $200 off-contract, you'll getting an aluminum-clad GSM phone with a fingerprint reader, a 5.5-inch 1080p display and mid-range specs that include a Snapdragon 616 chip, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel selfie shooter. You even get nano-SIM and micro-SIM slots that both support 4G data (though not at the same time), so you shouldn't have to fuss with SIM adapters or replacements to give this a whirl.
Huawei wants to bring its Honor smartphones to the US
Huawei wasn't kidding around when it talked about spreading its wings and launching more phones in Western markets. The Chinese mobile giant's George Zhao is teasing that it'll bring its Honor brand (and the accompanying devices) to the US, with an announcement due as soon as CES in early January. Just what you would see on this side of the Pacific isn't clear, but it's reasonable to presume that one or more of Honor's nicer smartphones would make it stateside.
Huawei's fight to fix its image and conquer the smartphone world
"Man, China gets all the good phones." This is the kind of comment we've been hearing a lot lately. But, very few of those Chinese smartphones make it to Western markets. Besides, some folks remain skeptical of Chinese smartphones -- either due to bad experience in the past or because of fears over spying by the Chinese government. Huawei in particular has taken quite a bit of heat, with the spotlight set on its founder, Ren Zhengfei, who served in the People's Liberation Army until 1983. Yet Ren has explained -- more than once -- that he was just an Engineering Corps officer who helped set up a synthetic fiber factory to tackle the country's clothing shortage, and his team was disbanded soon after completion. But that hasn't satisfied everyone and, as the world's third-largest smartphone maker plus one of the largest telecom equipment vendors, Huawei needs to prove its critics wrong.
Huawei's Honor 7i has just one flipping camera
Even though Huawei is just two weeks away from its IFA launch event, it couldn't help but push out another eccentric device beforehand. In Beijing today, the company unveiled the Honor 7i which, like the Oppo N series, has a camera that can flip around for some quality selfies. The imager in question has a 13-megapixel resolution, an f/2.0 aperture, a 28mm wide-angle lens and dual-tone LED flash, so not bad on paper. Better yet, the Honor 7i can utilize the screen to brighten your selfies in the dark. There's also a fingerprint reader located on the left side of the mid-frame, and it doubles as a camera button for some easy left-handed selfies.
By teaming up with Three, Huawei's Honor brand goes mainstream
Chinese firm Huawei is no stranger to the UK. Unbeknownst to many, it's an important provider of cellular infrastructure, and just a couple of weeks ago, it held its new flagship smartphone launch in London. Over the years, some of Huawei's top handsets have been ranged by major UK carriers, but these days you're more likely to see its name attached to low-cost, pay-as-you-go devices. Towards the end of last year, Huawei debuted its Honor smartphone brand in the UK and Europe, hoping this range of reasonably priced devices would find success in these parts. Perhaps to its detriment, Huawei went to great lengths to mask its ownership of Honor, instead introducing the brand as a new, pro-consumer smartphone manufacturer. Employing an online-only sales model, however, meant the name slid quickly into obscurity, but that changes in the UK today with Honor's first carrier partnership since the brand launched just over six months ago.
Huawei's dual-lens phone lets you get artsy, shoot in the dark
Judging by Huawei's latest smartphone unveiled in Beijing today, it looks like someone has taken a leaf out of HTC's playbook. The Honor 6 Plus -- a follow-up to the reasonably priced Honor 6 -- is all about its dual rear 8-megapixel cameras, which claim to boost the effective pixel size to 1.98 microns for improved sensitivity and thus cleaner images. By comparison, this almost matches HTC's 2-micron UltraPixels. And similar to HTC's Duo Camera feature, Huawei's dual-lens setup lets you refocus the captured photos, adjust their simulated aperture (you can go from f/0.95 all the way to f/16) and apply fun filters like tilt shift, sketch and comics. Even the front-facing camera has an 8-megapixel resolution to give you the "888" blessing (it implies "triple the fortune" in Chinese), along with the usual beautification feature for photos and videos -- both recording and live chat.
