Chinese smartphone vendor Huawei is preparing to launch its Honor 7 smartphone in the UK later this month at an initial offer price of under £200, according to reports. The pricing is said to be a time-limited offer to celebrate the European launch of Huawei’s Vmall official online store, which is expected to facilitate direct sales to end-consumers. At the end of the promotional period, the pricing of the device will increase by as much as much as 20 to 40 percent, according to anonymous sources quoted by Android Authority. The phone was launched in China last month by Huawei to a great response from consumers in the country, and reportedly received over two million pre-orders within the first twelve hours and 9 million overall within the first week itself.
The Vmall online store, as mentioned above, is Huawei’s effort to increase direct sales to consumers in Europe in an effort to increase its margins. The company had thus far only been selling its smartphones in the continent through either third-party retailers or via partnerships with carriers. The company’s Honor range of handsets meanwhile are only available in the UK through an exclusive partnership with Three UK, and through the Honor online store. Talking about Huawei’s Honor sub-brand, the lineup has seen an exponential growth in popularity in recent times, helping Huawei overtake Xiaomi as the number one manufacturer of Android devices in China this year.
Coming to the upcoming Honor 7 smartphone, the device is Huawei’s upper-mid-range offering, and comes with some impressive hardware for the price its asking. The smartphone is made out of metal, and features a 5.2-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display with a Full HD 1080p resolution, which gives it a 424 dpi pixel density. The device is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 935 chipset, which is designed in-house by Huawei. The chipset comes with an embedded 64-bit octa-core CPU with eight Cortex-A53 cores. Four of the cores run at a maximum of 2.2 GHz while the other four cores run at 1.5 GHz. The SoC also comes with an embedded Mali-T628 MP4 GPU. The Honor 7 comes with 3 GB of RAM and either 16 or 64 GB of storage depending on the chosen variant. The storage however, can be increased by up to 128 GB with the help of a microSD card.
As for the imaging options on the Honor 7, the primary rear-facing camera comes with a 20-megapixel Sony Exmor RS IMX230 sensor with phase detection autofocus and a dual LED, dual-tone flash. The secondary selfie-cam meanwhile, comes with an 8-megapixel sensor. The smartphone comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed, with Huawei’s proprietary Emotion UI 3.0 laid on top. The Honor 7 comes with Cat.6 LTE, which supports theoretical download speeds of up to 300 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 50 Mbps. The handset also comes with support for Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, microUSB 2.0, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS and NFC. The battery that comes with the device is a non-removable Lithium-Polymer unit rated at 3,100 mAh. The device also comes with an embedded fingerprint sensor.