Honor 50 Series Announced With Support For Google Mobile Services

Honor today announced 3 new Honor 50 series phones. The more interesting part of this announcement is that these phones come with Google Mobile Services (GMS) support. In fact, Honor can have Google Mobile Services preinstalled on compatible devices if this conforms to Google’s licensing and governance models.

Short Summary

After Huawei (Honors parent company) was added to the US entity list in 2019, it was cut off from both software (Google Apps) and hardware (chips) access from the US. This apparently expanded to include its subsidiaries, which also included Honor. As a result, Huawei was unable to expand its offering to the United States.

To address this, Huawei has pushed HarmonyOS forward with its PlayStore alternative, resulting in a cold user reaction that resulted in low sales. Therefore, Huawei sold Honor to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology. Since Shenzhen Zhixin is not on the US Entity List, Honor is now legally allowed to access hardware and software that Huawei cannot yet use.

Today Honor announced three new devices with unique camera designs and the latest hardware.

Honor 50 Pro specs

It is the top model of the trio with a 6.72-inch OLED display paired with an FHD + screen resolution, a refresh rate of 120 Hz and a touch sampling rate of 300 Hz. It has the Snapdragon 778G processor with up to 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.

The Honor 50 Pro has a quad camera setup with a 108 MP primary sensor, an 8 MP ultra wide and 2 MP depth, and a 2 MP macro snapper in a new design.

On the front there is a dual 32 MP and a 12 MP ultrawide selfie camera in a pill-shaped cutout design.

And finally, it’s powered by a 4,000 mAh battery with 100 watt fast charge support. There’s also a vanilla model that includes a 4,300 mAh battery with 66 watt wired fast charge support.

Honor 50 specs

The Honor 50 has a slightly smaller display than the Honor 50 Pro with 6.57 inches (OLED display) and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. The camera department on the back is the same as the Honor 50 Pro. On the flip side, the Honor 50 only has a single 32 MP selfie camera in a punch-hole cutout design.

It is also powered by the same Snapdragon 778G chipset and has a 4300 mAh battery that supports 66W fast charging.

Honor 50 SE specs

The SE variant of the trio of the Honor 50 series is the Honor 50 SE. It has a 6.78-inch LCD panel with a refresh rate of 120 Hz. It is powered by Mediateks Dimensity 900 with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage.

On the camera side, the Honor 50 SE also offers a quad camera setup with a whopping 108MP primary camera, which is the same in the Honor 50 series. On the back there is also an 8MP ultrawide and a 2MP macro camera. Like the rest of the trio, it also has a 4,000 mAh battery with 66 W charging support.

software

All three devices come with Magic UI 4.2 based on Android 11. The good part is that all international devices are expected to come with Google Mobile Services (GMS) support right out of the box.