If you asked us a few years ago which Android smartphone brand was the best, we likely would have said Huawei. Ask us the same question today and the answer varies from week to week, with a new competitor entering the market with a great value for money device.

The latest vying for attention is the Honor 50 from the eponymously named company. Those who remember Honor will know this is not the first time that the brand has looked to launch in South Africa, having mixed success two times previously while it was still under the Huawei umbrella.

It has since parted ways with Huawei and is now venturing on its own, with the Honor 50 being the first device being launched in South Africa.

As mentioned, it enters the country at an interesting time, where a number of new players have also entered the market and aim to take up the position that Huawei is trying to hold onto.

Could a former sub-brand be the one to usurp Huawei? Only time will tell, but for now we have had the Honor 50 in for review over the past two weeks.

Here is what we learned about the phone now that Honor is doing things solo.

A glittering design

We begin as always looking at the aesthetics on offer. Like many other phone makers, Honor has kept to a specific formula on this device – a relatively thin frame with narrow bezels and a slightly curved 6.57″ screen (2340×1080) and punch hole housing for the selfie camera.

So up front, things look good, but won’t necessarily pique your interest.

Honor has instead saved its best tricks for the rear of the phone, with the Frost Crystal model certainly eye catching. If we’re perfectly honest that option is not really our taste, but those who want a premium looking phone that can turn a few heads, it will do the trick.

As we often tend to do when it comes to technology, the simpler the colour option the better, so we’d opt for the Midnight Black instead.

Sticking with the rear and the sizeable camera array on offer that instantly reminds us of the yet-to-be-released Huawei P50 series. While it may look like there are only two lenses at play here, there are in fact four. The primary shooting option is a massive 108MP lens, which is supported by a trio of lenses – 8MP wide-angle, 2MP bokeh and 2MP macro.

There’s a 32MP selfie camera that can handle up to 1080p video recording at 60fps, if that’s your thing, but we mainly stuck to the rear array for the purposes of our review.

We will talk about the camera performance later on, but looking at what is assembled here on the surface and at R13 999 (RRP), the Honor 50 has plenty about it to stand up to the tough competition in the premium mid-range space at the moment.

Some familiar elements

As we delve into the device, things start to look even more interesting. As we mentioned Honor is on its own, and while that might be the case with the Honor 50 running Magic UI 4.2, there is still a distinct Huawei feel to the phone.

We especially noticed this while inspecting the different settings, such as the always-on screen, which is pretty much lifted from the Huawei Mate 40 Pro.

As such, despite the app icons on the home screen being a little larger and altered in this new UI, the remnants of Huawei remain.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, with EMUI having come a long way in recent years.

Crucially, however, and part of the reason for the split, the Honor 50 still supports Google Play Services. This means the Play Store and apps are readily accessible and you don’t have to worry about compatibility or support, which is one of the reasons why a new Huawei device always comes with a caveat.

Here there is no such concern, giving the Honor 50 a distinct advantage over any similarly specced mid-rage phones that Huawei launches.

Never missing a beat

As for the components powering things, the Honor 50 comes well appointed in that category, with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G doing the heavy lifting, along with 8GB RAM and 256GB onboard storage.

This chipset also has the benefit of supporting 5G, so you’re sorted whenever ICASA and carriers can get their act together and make it widely available locally.

Until then, you have a speedy device on your hands, with the Honor 50 one of the better phones we have benchmarked this year, registering 2 855 and 786 on GeekBench’s multi-core and single-core tests respectively, which is in and around Xiaomi 11T Pro 5G territory.

As for the camera performance, the Honor 50 is great. It ticks all the boxes and handles outdoor photography in particularly quite well. Low light shooting is fairly solid, but the Pro mode offers up a few more options for more experienced photographers to play around with.

With the margins quite fine between similarly specced models in this space at the moment, it can be difficult to shine through, but the Honor 50’s camera setup does a good job of handling most things thrown at it.

The camera UI looks very much like the Huawei one, so that is another area where some similarities can be spotted.

Final verdict

At R13 999 (RRP), the Honor 50 could very easily be lumped into the category of premium mid-range phones flooding the market at the moment, but the device’s jack of all trades performance and support for 5G means it is a phone that will stand you in good stead for the new couple of years at least.

Added to this, and perhaps most importantly, while there are still some remnants of the Huawei era visible on this phone, it features the necessarily elements needed where it counts – namely support for Google Play Services.

It may not be the cleanest of breaks from Huawei, but the Honor 50 has more than enough about it to stand on its own as a solid all-around Android smartphone.