Honor, the Chinese smartphone brand that was once a part of Huawei but was sold out to a consortium of over 30 brand’s agents and dealers, has launched its first smartphone after the separation.
Apart from the launch of the Honor V40, the company also announced that it has partnered with suppliers that it did not have access to earlier because of its Huawei connection. The official statement by the company names brands like AMD, Intel, MediaTek, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Sony as its partners.
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With these partners, Honor will not only be able to procure supplies for its smartphones but even for the laptops and other smart devices that the company plans to launch in its 1+8+n product strategy that has smartphones at its core.
Honor, under Huawei, was primarily focusing on budget and mid-segment devices. However, with its refreshed product strategy that aims to offer products for “All Scenarios, All Channels and All People” the company now aims to target users from price ranges.
In November 2020, Huawei announced that it will let go of the Honor subsidiary in a bid to keep its business intact and subvert the trade implications that its parent company was subjected to. That makes the Honor View 40 the first smartphone from the brand as an independent entity. While it has regained rights to trade with key chipset makers such as Intel and Qualcomm, there’s still no confirmation if it is also eligible to ship devices with Google services onboard. For the uninitiated, Android phones in China anyway do not support GMS, so we will have to wait for it to be available in other countries.
Another key aspect of the launch was the fact that the new Honor V40 comes with Android. However, it is not clear if it also comes with GMS. Since the launch was in China where phones do not come with GMS, it is still unclear if Honor devices outside China will come preloaded with Google services.
TechRadar has reached out to the communications team of Honor to get clarification around this and will update this article once we get an update.
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