Honor V40 5G official, could skirt US bans directed at former parent company Huawei

Former Huawei sub-brand Honor has launched the V40 5G flagship smartphone in its home market of China. The new device is the first to launch since Honor became an independent company under the ownership of a consortium of Chinese partners hailing out of Shenzhen. Although the V40 underwent much of its development while Honor was still owned by Huawei, the change of ownership means that Honor should be able to skirt around any US trade bans that have hamstrung Huawei.

For international customers, who are likely to see the device traditionally renamed the Honor View 40, this means that it will almost certainly ship with the officially sanctioned version of Google’s Android on-board along with related Google services including the Google Play Store. In terms of its hardware, the V40 5G will be powered by the very solid MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ which features four high-performance Arm Cortex-A77 cores clocked at 2.6 GHz joined to four high-efficiency Arm Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz. This is mated to 8 GB of RAM and up to 256 GB of storage.

In terms of its camera set up, the Honor V40 5G features a “Mahong-card” styled rear camera module fitted with three camera modules and a laser focus module. The main camera incorporates a 50 MP sensor, while the ultra-wide angle camera is rated at 8 MP and the macro camera picks up a 2 MP sensor. The front sensor is embedded in pill-shaped cutout in the OLED display and is rated at 16 MP. Speaking of the OLED display, it is 6.72-inches in size and features a 300 Hz touch-sampling rate and a 120 Hz refresh rate. The battery is a reasonable 4,000 mAh.

The Honor V40 is retailing for the equivalent of US$555 for the 8 GB/128 GB model and US$618 for the 8 GB/256 GB range-topper.