Honor announces its first post-Huawei phone

Honor announced the new flagship phone V40 5G, the first since Huawei sold the company to a consortium of Chinese partners based in Shenzhen. The phone is exclusive to China for the time being, but the Honor V series usually reaches the rest of the world with the “Ver” brand.

The V40 has a 6.72-inch OLED screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate and is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ processor. The main camera has a 50 megapixel 1 / 1.56 inch sensor. The 4,000 mAh battery can be charged wirelessly at 50 W or 66 W with a cable.

Huawei announced that it was selling Honor in November due to “tremendous pressure” and a difficulty in securing an adequate supply chain. Although Honor was operated independently of Huawei, it relied on the controller for much of its technology, such as HiSense’s Kirin processors. This means that it was hit with the same intensity by American sanctions that prohibited American companies from doing business with Huawei.

V40 phones will certainly be in development since the beginning of November, but now that Huawei has discarded Honor, the international “View 40” version of the V40 can be shipped with Google services on board. This would allow Honor to sell phones in Western markets and beyond, without the huge disadvantage of having to rely on Huawei’s AppGallery, which still cannot compete with the Google Play Store outside of China, where Google has no presence.

At the same time, Honor no longer has the advantage of relying on Huawei’s supply chain, so it will have a lot of work to do to establish itself as a strong brand on its own once the phones are launched elsewhere. For now, it is available in China with prices starting at 3,599 yuan (~ $ 550) for a model with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. 3,999 yuan (~ $ 620) doubles storage to 256 GB.