A little bit of recent history: In 2018, the Trump administration’s intended US sanctions cut Huawei out of global component supply chains. It means that American companies cannot do business with Huawei. So, for example, no more Android, the operating system owned globally by nine out of ten smartphones. After two years of sanctions, Huawei decides to sell its Honor smartphone brand to a national consortium in order to get out of the US black list. In this way, the Huawei brand becomes a Chinese manufacturer like any other. Almost. In recent days, therefore four years after the start of the trade war between Huawei and the US government, Magic4 Pro is released, the first smartphone from Honor designed to compete with the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy. Let’s start with the price: 1099. Which if we want it is a lot for a brand born for the mid-range, for the very young audience. But the Chinese manufacturer’s choice was to put everything that other top-of-the-class smartphones have at a slightly lower price. So you will find as well as of course Android with Google Play services also the latest generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon microprocessors, an excellent quality 6.81-inch Amoled Ltpo display, a depth data sensor like that of the Pixel family, a maxi-battery from 4,600 mAh and three cameras: one 50Mp, one ultra-wide-angle WITH E 122 ° viewing angle and one telephoto lens with 64Mp 3X optical zoom.
Maybe it even has too many things and something in the software needs to be fine-tuned. For example, updates to the operating system are currently only guaranteed for two years.
As a project, however, it is certainly courageous and ambitious.
Courageous because it arrives on the market at a difficult time with iPhone and Samsung that seem willing not to increase their production of mobile phones, given the continuing emergencies on the war and semiconductor front. Ambitious because at least in Italy it points to a duplicity (that of Samsung and iPhone) that perhaps has been going on for too long.