HONOR 30s announced: HONOR's mid-range gets a speed boost

We already heard murmurings of a Kirin 820 chipset earlier this month, and now HONOR has made it official by launching the Kirin 820-powered HONOR 30s in China.

The new chipset is a reasonably heavy lifter on the CPU front, delivering four Cortex-A76 cores (one at 2.36Ghz and three at 2.22Ghz) and four Cortex-A55 cores (1.84Ghz). This should translate into better multi-core performance in theory than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700 series.

HiSilicon’s new processor also sports a Mali-G57 MP6 GPU rather than Mali-G77 graphics as previously rumored. Otherwise, you can also expect an upgraded NPU as well as 5G capabilities.

What else does HONOR 30s offer?

5G generally requires more juice than 4G, but the HONOR 30s features a 4,000mAh battery that’s not exactly large compared to other 5G phones. Fortunately, 40W wired charging means you can hit 100% capacity in just over an hour, and 70% in 30 minutes (there’s no wireless charging though).

The phone is pretty solid in the camera field though, delivering a 16MP selfie camera in a punch-hole and a quad rear camera arrangement. The quad system consists of a 64MP main camera, 8MP 3x telephoto shooter, 8MP ultra-wide camera, and 2MP macro sensor.

Other notable specs include a 6.5-inch FHD+ LCD screen with an unspecified refresh rate, a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, USB-C, 3.5mm port, and storage expansion (yay!) via NM card (boo!). Don’t expect an IR blaster or NFC though.

The HONOR 30s is listed at 2,399 yuan (~$338) for the 8GB/128GB model via Tmall, and 2,699 yuan (~$380) for the 8GB/256GB variant.