Honor 70 arrives in the UK on September 2nd for £480

A little under three months after it was first announced in China, Honor has launched its midrange Honor 70 smartphone in the UK. The phone is set to start at £480 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, rising to £530 for 256GB of storage. Both versions will go on general sale on September 2nd, with preorders opening tomorrow. Stay tuned for our full review next week.

Compared to last year’s Honor 50, the Honor 70’s camera specs are a lot better balanced this time around. (An Honor 60 was announced in China in December but never saw a global release.) Rather than pairing an incredibly high-resolution 108-megapixel camera with three extra sensors totaling just 12-megapixels in resolution between them, the Honor 70 balances a 54-megapixel main sensor with a 50-megapixel ultrawide (which also handles macro shots) and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. It’s an approach that, with any luck, will result in a more versatile camera system overall.

Image: Honor

There are also new software features. Honor boasts that its “Solo Cut Mode” lets you film a wide shot in landscape, while the phone simultaneously films a second video in portrait that can track a subject as they move around the frame. Other multivideo modes supported natively in the Honor 70’s camera app include being able to film from both the phone’s rear and selfie cameras simultaneously as well as filming from both the main and ultrawide cameras.

Otherwise, the Honor 70 has a similar overall design to the Honor 50. It’s got that same distinctive dual-camera ring design on its rear and a curved 120Hz OLED display with a centrally orientated hole-punch notch. Look closer, however, and its specs have seen incremental improvements across the board. Its screen is a hair bigger at 6.67-inches corner to corner (up from 6.57 last year), and it’s also powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G Plus processor (after using the non-Plus version previously). It’s also got a slightly bigger 4,800mAh battery, which can be fast charged at up to the same 66W charging speeds.

Alongside its new smartphone, Honor is also announcing the Pad 8 tablet, which Gizmochina reports that it launched as the Honor Tablet 8 in China last month. The tablet has a 12-inch LCD with a resolution of 2000 x 1200 and is powered by a Snapdragon 680 processor. It’ll cost £270 in the UK and will be available direct from Honor tomorrow or on September 2nd from Amazon.