Honor’s relationship with Huawei will quickly convey large software program advantages — nevertheless it’s unclear how a extra fleshed-out Honor lineup may coexist with the mum or dad model.
At a current occasion in China, Honor Vice President George Zhao announced that the Honor 8 had handed 1.5 million models bought in simply two months. The telephone went on sale first in China in July, earlier than arriving within the West lower than a month in the past. Underscoring the speedy progress of Huawei’s online-centric model, Zhao additionally revealed that 100 million Honor telephones had been bought in complete all through the model’s 999-day historical past.
These are two huge milestones, however the early success of the Honor eight particularly stands out — certainly helped alongside by Honor’s extra established presence in Europe nowadays, and the overall quality of the product.
Honor owes a number of that to Huawei. Beneath its ridiculously reflective exterior, the Honor eight is principally a Huawei P9. And this yr’s Honor telephones have benefitted from the huge enhancements within the firm’s EMUI software program, which is extra usable than ever.
And on the software program aspect, issues are about to get so much higher. EMUI four.1 nonetheless has some nagging points, primarily to do with the best way background apps, notifications and app-switching are dealt with. What little we have seen of the upcoming EMUI 5, based mostly on Android Nougat, provides us hope that these final vestiges of Huawei weirdness are going away, changed by an altogether extra Western-friendly UI. The leaked EMUI 5 construct we have seen operating on the Huawei P9 has inventory Android-style notifications and task-switching UI — lastly — alongside different visible tweaks.
These are huge, necessary change that’ll make all Huawei — and by extension, Honor — telephones extra interesting to telephone consumers within the West. As issues stand, software program continues to be Huawei’s largest weak spot. When EMUI 5 lands, and that is not the case, anticipate adoring reward from the tech press to bolster gross sales of Huawei telephones amongst lovers.
As we mentioned a couple of months again, it is partly because of Huawei’s new focus on software design, led by an enormous new rent:
[EMUI 5] would be the first probability we get to see the work of former Apple artistic director Abigail Brody, who Huawei employed in September 2015 to supervise consumer expertise, constructing a group out of its newly established San Francisco design middle. That in itself ought to inform you how critical Huawei is about software program design […]
A extra streamlined, Googley Huawei UX layer also needs to assist the corporate push out Android updates quicker — like many telephone makers, Huawei has struggled to push out new variations in a well timed method. In a recent interview, Huawei smartphone chief Changzhu Li revealed that the corporate has set a two-month goal for updating its telephones in future. Positive, it is one factor to set such a goal and one other to realize it, particularly with service certification and different hoops to leap via.
Subsequent-gen Honor telephones ought to get all of the EMUI 5 goodies as normal.
The subsequent era of Honor telephones ought to get all these things as commonplace. (And the present ones, once they’re up to date, will get a lot better too.) Honor’s telephones have all the time been about higher-end hardware than you’d anticipate at a lower cost level than you’d anticipate — with the caveat that the software program’s a bit bizarre. When the one main catch subsequent to any Honor telephone buy goes away, anticipate gross sales to rise accordingly.
Nevertheless the Huawei angle additionally presents some challenges. The mum or dad model has a extra fleshed-out telephone lineup than ever earlier than, notably in Europe. There’s the Mate and “P” strains on the excessive finish, and the brand new Nova within the center. There’s already a bit of crossover between Nova and Honor, with comparable worth factors getting you both superior construct and battery life (within the Nova and Nova Plus) or flashier specs and design (within the Honor eight).
However the actual conundrum is between the Huawei P9 and the Honor eight. On the within they’re principally the identical telephone. Positive, distribution channels are totally different — the Huawei telephone lives inside the conventional service system, the Honor telephone is bought primarily on-line. (That is to say nothing of the visible variations that talk to every model’s picture.) However Huawei is more and more competing with itself on this area, and it is arduous to keep away from the conclusion that the Honor eight might erode European P9 gross sales within the longterm. If the identical occurs with subsequent yr’s P10 and Honor 9, it might be time to additional differentiate the 2 strains’ hardware.
Nevertheless issues pan out, 2017 is certain to be an fascinating yr for each Huawei manufacturers, with loads of momentum and necessary new software program modifications.