Honor Turns Up The Heat In Paris With 200 Series Launch Event

Huawei used to be one of the up-and-coming global phone brands. However, it has been massively affected by the America's sanctions on China, causing it to lose access to advanced smartphone chips and Google Play Services — the two things it needs to remain competitive versus Samsung and Apple.

While that ban has basically killed Huawei's global ambitions, it doesn't mean that it will just let its great smartphone line-up die. Huawei sold the Honor brand to a consortium in 2020, and while it took some time for the new company to turn out advanced new products, it now consistently does so.

For example, it launched a new mid-range phone lineup in 2022, and it also launched a new foldable at IFA 2023. The company has released so many new smartphones, it's quickly becoming a European staple. At the Honor 200 series launch event in Paris, Honor Global GTM and Marketing Direction Nicky Nahar said, "We're now the number one faster growing smartphone brand in Europe, with an impressive 67% growth year-on-year." If the company keeps releasing an amazing phone lineup year after year, it could soon regain the status that Huawei lost a few years ago.

While the Honor Magic 6 Pro and the foldable Honor Magic V2 Porsche Design Edition are the company's halo phones, not everyone needs those capabilities or even wants to spend that amount of money on a phone. So, today, it's launching the Honor 200 series — the best smartphone models from its mid-range line.

The company is starting off with the Honor 200 Pro, a 6.78-inch smartphone with portrait photography as its core focus. The phone sports a 50-megapixel main camera and uses AI models that have been optimized to produce precise exposures, light and shadow balance, and tone enhancements.

Honor also worked with iconic Parisian portrait studio 'Studio Harcourt', whose work include celebrity portraits of Marion Cotillard, Monica Bellucci, Roger Federer, and even that of Queen Rania of Jordan, to co-engineer its Honor AI Portrait engine. Honor said, "The beauty of light is made up of light and shadow," so it leveraged the studio's more than 90 years of experience and expertise to train the Honor 200 Pro's AI in capturing photos.

Aside from its photography chops, the Honor 200 Pro also comes with a powerful Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 SoC with a 12GB+512GB memory/storage configuration. It also has a massive 5,200 mAh silicon-carbon battery with 100-watt wired and 66-watt wireless charging speeds.

The screen is also all important to the Honor 200 Pro, given that it's a photography-focused phone. It comes with a 6.78-inch display with all-rounded sides, giving it a floating illusion. But aside from its physical appearance, it can also hit 4,000 nits of peak brightness, allowing you to see it clearly even under the brightest conditions.

Honor also had a surprise announcement alongside the smartphone — its new Honor MagicBook Pro 16, powered by an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H processor, allowing it to leverage AI features. More importantly, it also comes with an optional dedicated Intel Arc GPU, so you can reliably play games on this laptop without sacrificing visual fidelity for some performance gains.

But aside from these hardware gains, the MagicBook Pro 16 is also the first ever Windows laptop to feature spatial audio. This laptop comes with four woofers and two tweeters, giving you an immersive audio experience straight from the box. It also has a 16-inch, 165Hz display that supports 100% DCI-P3 and 100% sRGB color gamut, and is HDR 400 certified, with a peak brightness of 500 nits.

These features make the MagicBook Pro 16 the ultimate laptop for entertainment and productivity. It also has a massive 75Wh battery, which lets the laptop last for up to 12 hours on a single charge under regular office loads. The MagicBook Pro 16 starts at 1,299.90 euros or approximately $1,409, available now (integrated graphics version) in France via the Honor store.