Honor has launched a lot of new products to the Chinese market today including a rather fetching 16.1in MagicBook Pro Windows laptop. Other products include the ViewPad 6 Android tablet and Vision X1 smart TV , as well as a smart kettle and toothbrush.
The products are part of Honor’s new ‘All-Scenario smart life strategy’ that basically seems to imply you could build a smart home setup with purely Honor products – presumably with the Honor Router 3 at the centre of it all.
The most eye-catching new tech is the MagicBook Pro. While Honor and parent company Huawei’s smartphones have been hamstrung by not being able to run Google services, its laptops are still free to run Windows 10. At £550, the MagicBook 14 is amazing value so we hope to see the new Pro make it outside of China.
It has a 10th-generation Intel Core i7-10510U processor and the Nvidia GeForce MX350 graphics card, making it a very capable machine. We don’t have pricing at the time of writing, but we expect Honor to comfortably undercut similarly clocked laptops here, and there’s a Core i5 model that will come in at even less.
The 8K Vision X1 TV series will be available in 50, 55 and 65in; the ViewPad 6 (presumably Android minus any Google services) has the Kirin 985 chipset, a 2K display and pen accessory; while the Router 3 brings latest-gen Wi-Fi 6 connectivity to the party.
Perhaps more remarkable is the range of cheaper smart devices Honor also showed off. Branded as Honor Choice, the products include a cordless vacuum cleaner, an air multiplier, air humidifier, smart lamp, kettle and toothbrush.
We can’t be certain, but it seems to be similar to Xiaomi’s strategy of licensing its brand to products that it doesn’t itself manufacture. Honor implied that these cheaper smart home products will make it to the European market (see markets listed in below image).
Honor’s rise, along with Huawei, had all the wind taken out of its sails by the US trade ban that has stunted its smartphone growth in Europe. It continues to build great products, but many of the ones launched today in China may not make it to Europe.
Finally, Honor Choice is also pushing a pair of true wireless earbuds that somehow look even more like AirPods Pro than the previous Magic Earbuds.
Author: Henry Burrell, Phones Editor
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.