Honor unveils new tech advances

Honor, one of the twin signature smartphone brands owned by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, unveiled a string of new technologies on Monday to demonstrate its continued efforts in pushing forward the technical boundaries for smartphones.

The move came as Honor achieved 150 percent year-on-year growth in overseas markets while maintaining its position as China's leading e-commerce smartphone brand.

Xiong Junmin, general manager of Honor products, said the company has developed Link Turbo technology, an artificial-intelligence-powered feature that allows simultaneous downloading via Wi-Fi and 4G networks for maximum throughput.

The feature will allow Honor's smartphones to conveniently switch from Wi-Fi to 4G when the former becomes slow, reducing the trouble of switching between the two manually when the connection speed changes.

The company also said on Monday that its Honor V20 model, due to be released on Dec 26, will feature an all-screen display with just a circular front camera cutout. Such a design will offer an impressive screen-to-body ratio since it features a hole in the display for the front camera. The hole will be about just 4.5 millimeters in width, outdoing its competitors' 6 millimeters, Honor said.

In 2018, Honor achieved 150 percent year-on-year growth in overseas markets. More importantly, it has reached the top five in a number of foreign countries. In Russia, for instance, it is now the No 2 smartphone vendor, according to market research company Canalys.

The company also announced on Monday that its Honor 10 model is now officially available in Hong Kong, marking its first foray into the region.

Michael Gold, editor of The Economist Intelligence Unit, a market research unit affiliated with The Economist magazine, said artificial intelligence is widely regarded as the most important supply-chain innovation in the next five years.

Product design innovation and product quality could be most positively impacted from AI advancements, according to the unit's survey of around 325 respondents, most of whom are presidents and senior executives in China, Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United States.