Honor chief boasts Magic 2 phone is so sophisticated it beats any handset out there – including the iPhone

Honor, one of the two smartphone brands owned by Huawei Technologies, released its most expensive handset to date on Wednesday, packed with a dozen of the Chinese company’s most advanced technologies and aimed at beating any handset in the market.

“While we were designing Honor Magic 2, we did not even see [Apple’s] iPhones as a competitor,” said Zhao Ming, Honor’s president, during a media briefing in Beijing on Wednesday evening.

The Honor Magic 2 series, which “carries the scientific and technological idealism” of Honor’s engineers, according to Zhao, contains a slew of innovative and advanced features. These include a 6.39-inch sliding full-view display without a notch, an almost 100 per cent screen-to-body ratio, sliding camera solution, 3D biometric facial unlock technology, as well as an in-display fingerprint feature that allows users to unlock the phone either through face unlock or tapping on the screen.

It also has a new voice assistant “Yoyo”, similar to iPhone’s Siri, an AI feature that is able to develop and grow through self-learning thanks to Huawei’s self-designed Kirin 980 processor, empowered by the world’s first dual-core NPU processor, according to Honor.

With Apple’s iPhones losing steam in China, China’s leading smartphone makers have started to offer their own innovations on handsets to acquire more market share, as well as lifting retail prices to bolster profitability. However, Apple chief executive Tim Cook recently indicated that the company’s more affordable iPhone XR is apparently doing better in China than its recent high-end flagship released in September.

Meanwhile Apple’s App store, which offers an ecosystem of mobile apps across the globe, is also still seen as a key competitive advantage for the Cupertino, California-based company versus its array of Android-based competitors in terms of brand loyalty.