During the Honor Alpha Plan keynote address at MWC in Barcelona, Spain, the company’s chief marketing officer, Dr Ray Guo, announced a slate of new devices coming to market soon.
Four new devices were announced, namely the MagicBook Pro 14 laptop, Pad V9, Watch 5 Ultra, and Earbuds Open.
Plenty to see
It seems Honor is positioning the MagicBook Pro 14 to be its most performant 14in laptop, sticking either an Intel Core Ultra 5 225H or Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset inside and giving it an 80W high-performance mode. Combine that with either 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD and those are some pretty respectable performance specs.
They’re joined by a 14.6in OLED display that also supports a touchscreen option. It features a resolution of 3,120 x 2,080, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 700 nits. Lastly, powering all this is a 92Wh battery, the industry’s largest battery in a 14in laptop, according to Honor.
Scaling things down slightly, the Honor Pad V9 measures 11.5in diagonally and less than 1cm thick while weighing a mere 475g. It might not sport an OLED display but the LCD screen still supports a resolution of 2, 800 x 1,840 and a snappy 144Hz refresh rate. Inside lies a Dimensity 8350 Elite chipset and a 10,100mAh battery.
Wearables time
In more personal device news, Honor announced its next flagship wrist-based wearable, the Honor Watch 5 Ultra. Available in brown and black colourways, its 1.5in AMOLED screen is protected by sapphire glass while its innards are encased in a titanium alloy body.
It will presumably offer all the health and fitness tracking you’d expect from a premium wearable, including over 100 sports modes with a dedicated free-diving mode. That said, its headline feature is probably the 480mAh battery, which is said to last for up to 15 days on a single charge.
It doesn’t get more personal than something you fit inside you, and while the Honor Earbuds Open don’t have silicone tips, they come close enough to count. These share many design elements with dedicated fitness buds like the Jlab Epic Air Sport while also featuring the seemingly useful AI translation feature, which supports fifteen languages in three separate modes.
Read More: Honor reveals its ‘Alpha Plan’ AI strategy
In exclusive mode, the buds will play a translation of what is said to you while playing a translation of your reply from your phone’s speaker. In shared mode, you give one bud to a willing local while wearing the other so you can converse in real time with your new pal (there’s no other word for someone you share earbuds with).
Finally, there’s an interpretation feature that will also provide real-time translation of a foreign lecture or presentation right into your ears but it’s not entirely clear how it differs from exclusive mode. We’ll need to play around with these in a few real-world tests and report back.
Honor’s new toys in South Africa
While reporting on new tech is fun, it’s made all the better when we know that tech is heading to South Africa. We’ve heard murmurs that Honor’s Magic 7 Pro will land in early April, but we haven’t yet had concrete confirmation that any of the new devices will make it or how much they will cost if they do.
