INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Honor, a part of the Huawei consumer business group, will be entering the PC market of India with two laptops next year.Honor has primarily
dealt only with smartphones in the subcontinent
Still, that segment has been going through a rough patch due to the trade war sanctions put on them, which no longer allows them to use
Android and other American products and services
While its smartphone future is uncertain, Honor is looking to bring its MagicBook laptops to India
These can be seen as slightly affordable alternatives to Huawei’s MateBooks.The current skew of Honor MagicBooks comes in either an Intel
Options include a quad-core Intel i5-8250U with Nvidia MX150 graphics with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, or the AMD Ryzen 5 2500U and Radeon Vega8
It’s unclear as now if both of these will make their way to India. Other Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi (and Redmi) have
abstained from bringing their laptops to India owing to insufficient demand
Honor could be the first from this space to bring laptops here
However, they won’t be manufactured in India, and will thus be priced slightly higher than what they are available in China for.James
Zhou, the president of overseas marketing and sales at Honor, spoke to The Economic Times, “We are working with Microsoft for our laptops
and will be launching two laptops in India in 2020” while adding that one of them will be a MagicBook
Considering that all current Honor laptops come with the MagicBook branding, the statement adds a bit of confusion. Honor 9X (Image credit:
Future)The Honor Vision, its first smart TV, is also expected to launch in India early next year
The Honor 9X and Magic Watch 2 are also slated to land in India in January 2020, ending its hiatus in the smartphone space
Taking into account that the Google fiasco is still far from over, it’s unlikely that this new smartphone will natively offer Google
services.Honor is also trying to rope in developers of major Android apps to create variants that will be available on the Huawei app store
to make up for the lack of the Google Play store in markets outside China
Investment in India will continue to bolster its online market and infrastructure.D5WXzgishcGCUogFSysTEW.jpg?#
