Honor Launches New Folding Phone, Aims for Full Popularization

On June 13th, Honor held a new product launch event at the Shanghai Westbank Dome Art Center and officially launched the long-awaited Honor MagicVFlip phone. After the launch event, Zhao Ming, the CEO of Honor Terminal Co., Ltd., gave an interview to the media.

The Honor MagicVFlip phone is equipped with the first-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ processor (3.0GHz). It adopts a four-curved equal-depth design in appearance. The 4.0-inch OLED external screen breaks industry records, with a folding thickness of 14.89mm and an unfolded thickness of 7.15mm, weighing only 193g. At the same time, it also has a 6.8-inch OLED Honor Oasis eye-care internal screen. At the launch event, Honor announced that the price of this phone is only starting from 4999 yuan, which aroused heated discussions among netizens. In the interview, the first media asked Honor CEO Zhao Ming if such a favorable price would promote the popularity of folding phones.

Regarding this, Honor Zhao Ming said, This pricing is definitely extremely difficult for Honor. It is unprecedented in the industry in terms of such specifications, configurations and pricing.

At the same time, he further said, We hope to truly achieve full popularity of folding screens through this way. We finally wrote at the end of the launch event 'Honor's full-form folding screen'. We say that consumers can fold as they like and have a variety of choices. There is no doubt that this pricing will definitely accelerate and promote the popularity of folding screens.

At the same time, some media were also curious that the price of the Honor MagicVFlip has dropped to such an extent. From a business operation perspective, what level of shipments is required to achieve break-even? Regarding this, Zhao Ming said that the shipments need to exceed one million units.

When talking about why Honor launched such a small folding phone when many brands are focusing on small folding, Zhao Ming said that precisely at this time, Honor is examining what exactly consumers need from small folding? Is it just to close the traditional phone and make it smaller? In this case, the value of the external screen is actually not well presented. And Honor believes that when there is no breakthrough in the concept of small folding, there is no value and significance in making small folding. Until the problem of small folding battery life, the use of the external screen as the main screen, and the connection and coordination between the internal and external screens are truly resolved, Honor officially launched. This is the core logic and concept of Honor in making products.

Zhao Ming said that small folding seems easiest to make, but actually it is the hardest for consumer experience. For example, many small folding phones need to be charged twice or even three times a day. For example, in terms of thermal design, basically all small folding phones use the internal screen, and the external screen is seldom used. Actually, opening frequently brings not convenience to consumers but trouble. All these require manufacturers to redesign the small folding product.

Honor believes that when the big folding unfolds, there is a unique added value at that moment, that is the combination between the phone and the tablet, and it can be coordinated. Then the value of small folding precisely lies in the moment it closes. When it closes, it maximizes its value and is what consumers hope to see something different. Therefore, Honor takes closing as the main direction of innovative breakthrough for small folding.

When we creatively make the external screen the main screen, the experience is good, the battery life is solved, and the reliability problem is also solved. So the solution is to have a breakthrough innovation.

Zhao Ming said.

At the launch event, the cooperation between Honor MagicVFlip and JimmyChoo Zhou Yangjie has also become a major highlight. Therefore, some media asked if such a cooperation would be expanded to more series of other products in Honor's own product line, and whether there will be many more such cooperation methods in the future?

Zhao Ming replied that for Honor, how to continuously improve the value presentation in the consumer interface. The cooperation with Yagu in shooting technology is the combination of traditional photography technology and AI. On another dimension, the cooperation between Honor and JimmyChoo, as well as the cooperation with Porsche Design, all hope to make cross-border in the entire industrial design, mobile phone and the entire industrial product ID design, and bring some distinctive understandings.

He further emphasized that only when the magic of technology combines with fashion can there be more chemical reactions. This is the value presentation in the consumer interface. Honor will always adhere to We won't do meaningless cooperation.

Regarding the external screen, TapTechNews found that many third-party applications cannot fully occupy the 4-inch small jumbo screen when adapting to the external screen, and the display ratio is still the traditional vertical display. Therefore, TapTechNews asked whether this is the normal state of adaptation or will there be more applications that will do further adaptation to fully utilize the 4-inch large screen?

Zhao Ming said that in the future, there will be various applications with different adaptation logics. When each application is presented on the screen, the experience logic is different. Many times, for those two cameras, for the full-screen application, because of the lower left corner position, many applications do not have core key information. In the entire development, Honor has different adaptation methods for more than 100 apps to fully present the advantages of the full screen.

Finally, some media found that after Honor's small folding was launched, it has become the only manufacturer with all forms of folding screens on sale. What kind of impact will this have on the mobile phone market? What will be the update frequency of various folding screen product lines in the future?

For this question, Zhao Ming said that these several products are very optimistic in terms of value presentation. This time, after Honor makes the external screen to the extreme, it will also communicate with consumers through this way again, and believes that the consumers' feedback will be very good.