Honor used to be best known as the younger sibling to its former parent brand Huawei, but since parting ways with the Chinese tech giant, the phone-maker has gone from strength to strength in forging its own identity. At MWC 2025, the company made its boldest move yet to plant a stake in the ground — not just as rival to the top Android phone makers, but to all companies making AI devices.
Honor didn’t unveil a new phone at the Barcelona mobile show — it debuted its new flagship, the Honor Magic 7 Pro, in January. Instead it announced a $10 billion investment in a range of AI products and devices. That doesn’t mean it’s abandoning phones, though. Its first project will be the development of an intelligent phone that will “revolutionize human-to-device interaction” in collaboration with Google and chipmaker Qualcomm.
“We are working closely to deeply integrate Google’s Gemini AI models into Honor solutions, and create new possibilities for users around the world that were never before possible, while protecting their data security and user privacy,” said Matt Waldbusser, managing director of consumer AI at Google Cloud.
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What Honor is hinting at is a shift to agentic AI, where we rely less on an app-based interface. Instead, once given a task or command, our mobile AI agent will reach into the apps on our phone to coordinate on our behalf. It’s a vision I first saw last year at Mobile World Congress, and has since gained traction, promising to radically reshape how we interact with our devices. During the company’s Barcelona keynote, it demoed the latest version of its AI agent and said it would be bringing it to devices in the near future.
For Honor, this is all part of its “Alpha Plan,” a fresh strategy from newly appointed CEO James Li that will see the company attempt to create AI devices and services to operate across different operating systems. The first step in this is a universal file-sharing system that Honor says will introduce ultrafast transfers between iOS and Android. Existing Honor phones will also benefit, with the company upgrading from five to seven years of Android OS and security updates, plus AI image upscaling to restore old pictures and AI deepfake detection rolling out to the Magic 7 Pro.
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Among its MWC announcements, Honor also had new devices to unveil. The include the Honor Earbuds Open for 149 euros (roughly converts to $155, £125 or AU$255), the Honor Watch 5 Ultra for 279 euros and the Honor Pad V9 for 250 euros. A laptop, the Honor MagicBook Pro14 is also coming soon, the company said.
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