Honor

Price: £450 from fave.co/3CTG8px

It’s all change for Honor at the moment. Once part of Huawei, the brand was spun off into its own company last year to escape the worst impact of a restrictive US trade ban. It’s taken a while, but the Honor 50 is the first phone the company has released globally since striking out on its own.

That means that the Honor 50 is the first Honor phone in some time to ship with full support for Google Mobile Services – but it’s also one of the first Honor phones to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and to run on software developed at least partly without Huawei’s support.

The good news is that Honor has hit the ground running with a phone that fits right in with its old game plan: flagship design, near-flagship performance, non-flagship price.

DESIGN

In many ways, this is a pretty classic modern slab phone with familiar touches like a curved display, slim bezels and a reflective rear – all of which help the phone feel premium, but also decidedly Honor.

I’ve been testing the phone’s ‘Emerald Green’ finish, but you’ll also find it in ‘Frost Crystal’, ‘Midnight Black’, and ‘Honor Code’. I’m a fan of the balance the green model strikes between understatement and pizzazz, but it is a fearsome fingerprint magnet, so you may find you want to throw a case on it anyway.

Thanks to the large display this certainly isn’t a small phone, but Honor has kept it light (175g) and slim (7.8mm)