Honor is testing wireless charging for its smartphones, but it doesn't believe the technology is efficient enough to include on the Honor 8.
The Honor 8 was rumored to include a wirelessly charged battery, but instead the Chinese firm - like many other brands - focused on improving its fast-charging feature.
Honor explained how it is developing wireless charging technology, but the company is waiting for a "big breakthrough" in efficiency first.
A big break
President of Honor George Zhao told TechRadar at the Honor 8 European launch, "We evaluated wireless charging compared with the nine volt, two amp fast charging technology and it showed, from our internal study, that wireless charging is not so efficient.
"We do want to be there with wireless charging because others already use it. We ask: how do you improve it to offer something special? That is our target.
"Today we do not have a big breakthrough in this part, but we will keep studying and researching."
Considering how similar the spec and tech inside the Honor 8 is to the Huawei P9 – a phone made by Honor's parent company - it seems likely this is the the same reason the P9 lacks contactless charging.
But according to Zhao Honor and Huawei do not share a research and development team.
Zhao said, "There are some telecom technologies we share, but for the design we have entirely separate teams. It's a different R&D team, different design team and most importantly a different product team."
Different, yet the same
The lack of wireless charging on the Huawei P9 could also be down to its metal uni-body being a barrier to the tech - although Qualcomm does think it can change that
Samsung has been pushing the hardest to include wireless charging in its phones for two years, and if Apple includes it in the iPhone 7 - which is an outside possibility and would further increase the calls for all manufacturers to include the technology on new phones.
Honor may then see fit to expand its experiments with wireless charging if more outlets include the capability to charge your phone in this manner - but we're unlikely to see this until the Honor 9.
- Be sure to read our hands-on Honor 8 review
