Huawei split its product launch into two acts this year.
Act I belonged to the freshly independent Honor Mobile. It was hosted by former Honor boss Zhao Liangyun, who strode onstage to thunderous applause and announced, "From today, Honor operates as its own company." Immediately afterward, the big screens lit with two new phones—Honor 7 and Honor 7 Plus—aimed squarely at China's ruthless mid-tier market.
The base Honor 7 carried the brand-new Kirin 700 chipset, a part Huawei had crafted expressly for ¥1,000–¥2,000 handsets. It nudged past last year's Kirin 810 on paper and, in lab tests, just breached the 90,000-point barrier on Antutu. Specs were competent rather than flashy: a 5.5-inch panel with 85 % screen-to-body ratio, a 3,000 mAh battery, a 20 MP + 2 MP rear camera pair, and a 12 MP selfie lens. Charging stuck to plain 10 W (5 V 2 A) rather than anything that might overheat cells. Good enough, if unspectacular.
Then Zhao pressed the price button, and the hall erupted:
• 3 GB + 32 GB – ¥1 288 (≈ $178)
• 3 GB + 64 GB – ¥1 699 (≈ $234)
Suddenly, "unspectacular" became "super-cost-effective." For less than ¥ 1,700, the phone out-muscled last year's Honor 3X and undercut every comparable Xiaomi.
But Honor hadn't come to play safe. The lights dropped, a new render rotated across the screen, and gasps rippled through the audience. Honor 7 Plus looked nothing like its sibling: notch-style full display, iridescent color-shifting glass back, razor-thin bezels. Huawei even bragged that the rear glass could shimmer from teal to violet depending on the angle of a coffee-shop Edison bulb—catnip for social-media fashionistas.
Hardware matched the glamour. Out went Kirin 700, in came Kirin 820—a 6-nm part whose 140 k-plus Antutu score flirted with Huawei's flagship Kirin 910 yet drew 20 % less power. Honor layered on dual 1,500 mAh cells wired in parallel and fed them through a 20-watt "4 A Dual-Pump" charger. The trick delivered flagship-grade top-ups while running cool enough to pass a jeans-pocket test. Cameras jumped to 24 MP leading + 10 MP secondary on the back, 16 MP up front, with an ISP tuned for low-light selfies.
Prices fell like a guillotine:
• 4 GB + 64 GB – ¥2 499 (≈ $344)
• 4 GB + 128 GB – ¥2 999 (≈ $413)
A sub-flagship phone under ¥ 3,000 was unheard-of, and reviewers still registered the shock when Act II began.
The show's second half pivoted to Huawei's brand-new Nova line, pitched as youthful, fashionable, and aggressively priced—essentially filling the slot Honor had vacated. Nova's first model reused Kirin 820, draped it in pastel metallics, and bundled a year of cloud storage. By leveraging HQ resources, Nova arrived with carrier subsidies and billboard money that only a corporate giant could muster.
In Jiangcheng, Heifeng streamed the entire event on his 34-inch monitor. He scribbled reactions in three columns—Threat, Parity, Weakness. Honor 7? Solid but still one step below last year's Hongmeng S2. Honor 7 Plus? It is hair under the forthcoming Hongmeng S3 in camera resolution, yet dangerously competitive in battery life and, more importantly, price.
He winced at the ¥2,499 figure. With the S3 pegged for ¥2,699, Huawei had fired a shot across his bow. He also noted Huawei's dual-cell fast-charge design, which mirrored the 35-watt split-pump system that China Star planned to unveil next quarter.
Yet differences remained. Kirin 820's GPU lagged Kunpeng A2 Lite by nearly 20 % in graphics benchmarks, and Huawei's 4 A charging still needed ninety minutes for a full tank—good, not class-leading. He wrote a counter-punch under Weakness: Focus on real-world battery endurance + color science selfie demos.
He closed the notebook and paced. Honor's sudden price-to-spec ratio would drain buyers from Oppo, Vivo, and even Xiaomi, but the collision course was with Hongmeng S3, which was due in six weeks. Market share was a zero-sum game. If Huawei had first captured the "fashion-performance" slot, S3's marketing spending could have evaporated like morning fog.
Hours later, his core team gathered around an oval table lit with take-out cartons. He laid out marching orders in clipped sentences:
BOM audit — shave production cost of S3 by at least ¥120 without touching user-visible parts. Options: negotiate a bulk discount on Sony sensors; switch to a domestic PMIC now that quality has stabilised.
Fast-charge showcase — film a split-screen: S3 topping up to 60 % while Honor 7 Plus still lingers at 48 %. Use a timelapse but no CGI; authenticity is our weapon.
Selfie war — push Jiang Li's Dove algorithm update one sprint earlier.—Target skin-tone retention in bar lighting is better than Nova's beauty filter.
Pricing buffer — prepare an emergency ¥2,599 tag if Honor's pre-order numbers exceed one argued. Millioo nemo's final line carried Heifeng's stamp: "Remember, users buy dreams, not data sheets. Give them a dream Huawei forgot."
Within twelve hours, Honor 7 pre-orders crossed 300,000 units, and Honor 7 Plus 180,000. Social tags #DualBatteryFastCharge and #IridescentGlass racked up millions of views. Meanwhile, Huawei blanketed metro stations with Nova posters—soft-focus portraits, with the slogan "Young at First Sight." It was Huawei's loudest consumer push since the P-series.
Heifeng felt the clock accelerate. He walked into the prototype lab where mint-colored S3 shells waited beside a tray of Kunpeng boards. He picked up a shell, held it against the overhead light, and imagined the upcoming battle: two brands, two visions of youthful tech, one victory. His reflection in the glossy surface stared back—calm, focused, unwilling to cede an inch.
He set the shell down gently. "Start final verification tonight," he told the engineers. "No burn-in failure tolerated. We launch on schedule, price ready to drop if needed. Someone call Jay Chou and tell him the teaser must have hit streaming platforms three days earlier. Huawei's got headlines; we need an anthem."
Outside, the first print reviews of Samsung's S6 Pro leaked: gorgeous, expensive, compromised. The throne was truly vacant now. Huawei had stepped up to claim it; China Star would have to snatch it in the same breath. Between them lay a field of consumers who cared only for beauty, battery, and bragging rights. The Hongmeng S3 would step onto that field in forty-two days, and Heifeng intended it to walk off wearing the crown.