What’s right and what’s wrong with Honor

Product Analysis – Honor Phones

A Chinese mobile manufacturing brand Honor, doing well in the Asian markets, however, is it sufficient to sustain or they really need to push hard now to beat companies such as Xiaomi, Oneplus etc. Honor launched several phones in 2018, starting from Honor 10, Honor 9n, Honor Play, Honor 8x etc. all the products did decent in India and other Asian countries.

Honor launched Hisilicon Kirin 970 and Kirin 659 last year, if I compare Kirin 970 with Snapdragon processors, Kirin 970 will match the performance with SD 835, so when in 2018 other companies were selling their phones with Snapdragon 845, Honor was selling with 970

If I consider Kirin 659, it is equal to Snapdragon 625, which is in 2018 not a very good processor, Honor keeps on selling phones with Kirin 659 such as Honor 9n, 9 lite etc. There is a big customer disconnect for these processors. Still overall hardware can be considered decent, however, software is a big no.

Honor provides EMUI skin on top of Android OS, which is very far from the stock one, in terms of looks and features. Where companies are going more stock, Honor is going away from it. Oneplus, Sony, HMD and a lot of manufactures are adopting stock android. Because of Honor’s EMUI skin, their early software update adoption is very slow. The company is not able to provide quick software improvements or updates and this leads to customer dissatisfaction.

If a company needs to sustain in the market, their strategy can be different as per the market, and to sustain in the Asian market, price to performance ration is the key parameter where Honor needs to work. Honor also needs to provide good software and quick updates to customers. Recently Honor launched phones such as Honor 8x, Honor Play which looks the right move but Honor still needs to work hard.