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Android 10 will come to Honor flagships starting March 15
The update is finally going stable after five months of beta testing
Honor is Huawei's successful lifestyle sub-brand that has gained quite some momentum outside of China. Being a Huawei subsidiary, it has to battle the same trade ban woes and won't be able to ship proprietary Google software on its newest handsets, while older devices are still exempted from this rule and continue to receive the familiar version of Android. Regardless of whether or not they have Google apps, a slew of Honor 20 phones and the 9X will start getting the Android 10-based Magic UI 3.0 beginning next week.
In view of the ongoing US-China trade war and the ban imposed on Huawei that restricts it from launching new phones with Google apps and services, you’d be forgiven for thinking the latest phone from sub-brand Honor was dead on arrival. And yet that’s not the case as the Honor 9X is packing all the Google goodness you’d usually expect. It’s business as usual. The reason for this is that it’s essentially the same device as the Huawei Y9 Prime or P Smart Z in terms of certification (according to Roland Quandt), which was already achieved during the extension period months ago.
At an event in China today, Huawei's sub-brand unveiled two new upper mid-range handsets, the Honor 9X and 9X Pro. They both feature pop-up front cameras, as well as the Kirin 810 SoC and a 48MP main camera sensor on the back. In view of their name, they sport a dazzling 3D gradient X -shaped finish on the back.