Honor 2018 flagship coming, to be based on Huawei P20?

Huawei’s Honor sub-brand saw a stealthy launch in South Africa earlier this month, offering the mid-range Honor 9 Lite and Honor 7X. The brand is also known for taking flagship Huawei phones and releasing them under the Honor name, albeit with a different design and a few other tweaks.

For example, we saw the Honor 9 in June 2017, essentially being a Huawei P10 in terms of chipset and camera setup. Back in 2016 we also saw the Honor 8, being a Huawei P9 with a few changes.

Now, an Honor representative has confirmed to Gearburn that the sub-brand will be offering a new flagship in 2018, presumably based on the P20.

“Honor traditionally launches a variant of the flagship Huawei handset. Such as Honor 8 following Huawei P9 and View 10 following Mate 10. Can we expect this with the Huawei P20?” we asked in an emailed query.

“Honor will launch (a) flagship model globally, but will not launch in SA [South Africa – ed] in 2018,” said Chris Sun, vice-president of Honor in Middle East and Africa.

Read more: Don’t expect high-end Honor smartphones in South Africa

It’s not quite confirmation that the Honor flagship will be based on the P20. Nevertheless, it would probably be a surprise if they didn’t launch a P20-derived smartphone in 2018.

We contacted the Honor representatives for clarification but have not received a response as of publication.