Honor announces its first post-Huawei phone

Honor has announced the new V40 5G flagship phone, its first since Huawei sold the company off to a Shenzhen-based consortium of Chinese partners. The phone is exclusive to China for now, but Honor’s V-series usually makes its way to the rest of the world under “View” branding.

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

Huawei announced that it was selling off Honor in November due to “tremendous pressure” and a difficulty in securing an adequate supply chain. While Honor was operated independently from Huawei, it relied on the parent company for much of its technology, such as HiSense’s Kirin processors. That meant it was hit just as hard by US sanctions banning US companies from doing business with Huawei.

The V40 phones will of course have been in development since earlier than November, but now that Huawei has divested itself of Honor, the international “View 40” version of the V40 may be able to ship with Google services on board. That 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 can’t compete with Google’s 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’s going to have work to do in order to establish itself as a strong brand in its own right once the phones launch elsewhere. For now, it’s available in China with prices starting at 3,599 yuan (~$550) for a model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. 3,999 yuan (~$620) doubles the storage to 256GB.