back to article Honor phone for paupers goes upmarket, assails flagships

Huawei launched its Honor brand to sell good value phones in the UK after experts at this sort of thing predicted Westerners would never be able to pronounce "Huawei". The experts at this sort of thing turned out to be wrong. Since its launch here in 2015 Honor has meant mid-market and budget, but things have got confusingly …

  1. mark.d

    pronunciation?

    after experts at this sort of thing predicted Westerners would never be able to pronounce "Huawei".

    and the pronunciation is?

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: pronunciation?

      It's Wah way

      1. PNGuinn
        Facepalm

        Re: pronunciation?

        Who are we?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: pronunciation?

      Her-wa way

    3. Steven Raith
      Joke

      Re: pronunciation?

      It's "Huawei" obviously.

      Steven "Sorry, someone had to do it" R

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: pronunciation?

      and the pronunciation is?

      Who cares? Every ethnic Chinese I've encountered has mangled my Welsh surname a treat, I don't mind, but equally I don't see why I should bother to worry about how Hoo-a-wey would like their name uttered.

      Sell me the soddin' device, stow yer cultural baggage where the sun don't shine.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: pronunciation?

        Wow, I didn't know there were Trump supporters in Wales.

        1. joeldillon

          Re: pronunciation?

          Wales voted for Brexit, remember.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: pronunciation?

          "Wow, I didn't know there were Trump supporters in Wales."

          Fuck that. The story here is they have the internet in Wales and someone has the money to pay for it.

          Youtube will be flooded with amateur boxing and choir singing videos in 3...2...1...

    5. Lars Silver badge
      Megaphone

      Re: pronunciation?

      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Huawei_pronunciation.ogg

      And I still can't pronounce it, but so what.

      1. Aladdin Sane

        Re: pronunciation?

        They could at least have spelt Honour correctly.

    6. DropBear
      Trollface

      Re: pronunciation?

      I refuse to acknowledge as valid any pronunciation that differs from the way Al Pacino would say it...

  2. Clive Galway
    FAIL

    Worst.strapline.ever

    "For the brave" does not instill visions of reliability.

    Plus, for UK sales, using the american spelling of Honour is not a smart move.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Worst.strapline.ever

      Not to mention that it, along with every phone on the market it seems, looks exactly like an iPhone from the front, sans the home button. You would think that after all this time one vendor would product at least one version of their phone product that does not look exactly like an iPhone.

      Is THAT really serving the market of angry anti-Apple guys (and face it it's all guys complaining about them) by giving those dudes a device that is a 99% hardware clone of the device they loath? No wonder they are even angrier; you can't purchase any phone without it looking like an iPhone, as all the vendors think the muggles who purchase their crap will only do so if it copies the market leader in every single way. Even Android is a silly clone of iOS. They are mostly feature for feature a copy of one and other. Get two devices, like I have, and look at them; some kind of login, then a home page with, surprise; iconic apps. Swipe this way or that, another page of more icons... when are vendors going to come up with an original design? It's tragic. There is no suitable alternative to Apple iOS products. And that is a shame because then Apple might get off their asses and port macOS to my iDevice. But not with you muggles unclogging the channels of anything that looks even a bit like an Apple product.

      TO THIS DAY I can still go out and find products that are still copying Steve Jobs' original, and very slight, idea to produce some computers in five different shades of color. And the colors are always the Apple ones; blue, orange, green, yellow, and red. It's never anything else. So, anti-Apple fan bois... you're a sad lot of folks living in a world where every product mocks you... that must be rough. :P

      1. DaddyHoggy

        Re: Worst.strapline.ever

        Did you know your rant was going to get downvoted and so you only posted as AC?

        You must find it infuriating that every car has a steering wheel right in front of the driver's seat - when will car manufacturers innovate and move the wheel or change its shape - oh yeah - because it just works and human's like stuff that's intuitive, familar and just works...

        There are decades of prior art in Science Fiction that shows Apple/Jobs did nothing innovative with the iPhone other than make manifest (when technology allowed) the concepts that had already been thought of by scores of SF writers and shows - so other smartphone manufacturers aren't copying Apple/Jobs, they're following the same intuitve/obvious Human Factors driven interface mechanism that Jobs did.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Worst.strapline.ever

          "You must find it infuriating that every car has a steering wheel right in front of the driver's seat - when will car manufacturers innovate and move the wheel or change its shape"

          ... I give you the Austin Allegro (cue chorus of "please don't" ... actually an Allegro was my first car passeed onto me from an eldely relative who realzied she no longer used it and while having a few "quirks" just having a car as a student in the 80s was great ... though the "quartic" steering wheel was a bit much so had it swapped and only oprion available with a BL badge in centre at the parts shop was a 12" wheel probably internded for rallying in a mini cooper gave mine an interesting touch!)

          1. Scott 53

            Re: Worst.strapline.ever

            "I give you the Austin Allegro "

            I further give you the Mini Metro, where the steering wheel wasn't directly in front of you but offset a bit (I think to the left). As this was the first car I ever drove I didn't realise how odd this was for a while.

        2. DropBear

          Re: Worst.strapline.ever

          "You must find it infuriating that every car has a steering wheel right in front of the driver's seat"

          I didn't downvote you but it took all my self-restraint not to. Just because everyone apes everyone else these days as far as smartphones go it doesn't mean they should and it certainly doesn't mean they have to. I would pledge without hesitation not one but several firstborns for a phone with a traditional, large, landscape slide-out qwerty keyboard - or heck, even for a modern iteration of the franken-thing that was the Nokia 6800. Yes, it would probably still have a touchscreen and icons. No, FUCK rounded corners.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Worst.strapline.ever

        I have an iPhone and a Honor 7. My employer paid for the iPhone, I paid for the Honor. After replacing the awful UI on the Honor (with Nova launcher) I couldnt be happier with the Honor after 12 months use. The iPhone had to be replaced after 6 months (faulty) and is absolutely awful to use to the point where I use my personal phone for company business a lot of the time. I will soon be leaving my employer and one of the things I will be looking forward to is handing back that over-priced piece of merde and drinking several pints of beer to try and wash away the memory of it.

        1. Sampler

          Re: Worst.strapline.ever

          @AC - my employer gave me an iPhone, after a few months of not answering or returning any calls / texts / emails on it they gladly exchanged it for a device of my selection.

          Petulant, yes, effective, also yes..

      3. pyrasanth

        Re: Worst.strapline.ever

        I think he's right! I want a triangular phone with shiny levers...

      4. AIBailey

        Re: Worst.strapline.ever

        ...along with every phone on the market it seems, looks exactly like an iPhone from the front

        There are only so may ways that you can design a phone with a large screen. It's notable that the Huawei phone here doesn't have any buttons on the front, a trend that many Android manufacturers follow (there's no need as Android supports an on-screen home button), so to say "exactly" is somewhat incorrect.

        you can't purchase any phone without it looking like an iPhone,

        Consider the fact that Apple, for a long time, stuck with the 3:2 aspect ratio screen, and were getting left behind as many Android manufacturers had moved to 16:9. As Apple's later phones are now also 16:9, you could argue that you can't purchase any iPhone without it looking like an Android.

        Even Android is a silly clone of iOS

        Yeah. I agree. Apart from that pull down notification thing that Android was doing for years before iOS. And the ability to use third party keyboards, that Android has always done. And for goodness sake, how long was it before iOS even did something as basic as change the case of the keyboard layout depending on whether shift or caps lock was in use? Multitasking - Android was doing that way before iOS, and Apple's first attempts were restricted to a handful of specific apps. Give it another couple of years, and Apple will trumpet the next new innovation for iOS - the app drawer. At which point, every Apple fan will point out how Android is yet again copying iOS by having a convenient place to put the application icons instead of peppering them over the home screens.

        Android and iOS share many features nowadays, but don't kid yourself that Apple haven't wholesale pinched ideas from Android (as well as the other way around)

        a home page with, surprise; iconic apps. Swipe this way or that, another page of more icons

        Well, on MY android phone (also a Huawei, FWIW), my home page has nothing more than a few widgets (showing me at a glance my calendar and email). A further swipe has another page with another widget (my music player) and a few folders with my most used apps. For as long as it's been a "thing", Android has the aforementioned app drawer. Unlike an i-device, there's no need to have an icon for every single application nailed to your screen (unless you like it that way, in which case a system setting or an alternative launcher will come to your rescue).

        I do get amused by the fanatical rambling of iPhone lovers.

  3. salamamba too
    FAIL

    In UK?

    Surely if it is for UK, they should have tried a bit arder, and remembered the U,

    1. Geoffrey W

      Re: In UK?

      So that's "Onour"?

      1. Schultz

        So that's "Onour"?

        More like "Oner".

    2. DiViDeD

      Re: In UK?

      But I thought it was named in honour of Cathy Gale.

      Older readers may understand this

  4. DaddyHoggy

    My wife has been HTC through-and-through for well over a decade, but after my eldest got an Honor 7 and my wife played with it for a bit she took the P9 as her upgrade rather than the latest variant of the HTC One.

    I'm on a SIM only contract, so I'm hanging on to my increasingly flaky Galaxy S3 for just a bit longer before I see what the prices of the P9 or Honor 7 drop to next year as the price of the Honor 8 is a bit meaty for me at the moment.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dick-to-phone...

    A couple of years ago my wife asked me to buy her an iPad. Obviously, being tech-literate, for me that was a complete no-no. The only Apple allowed in this household is a Cox's Orange Pippin. So I interrogated her and discovered that she'd seen a friend using an iPad and she liked it. Further questioning revealed that the reasons were that she could carry photos around on it, take photos, use email - all the standard stuff that any tablet does so why iPad not Android? Turned out the killer feature was that iPad was available in white. I scoured the market for a white Android tablet and found a Huawei. As you'd expect, half the price of the iPad but overall a better spec (e.g. takes SD and SIM cards, not Apple). And she loves it.

    Now to explain my title. Visiting Russia and by now inseperable from her Huawei Russian friends were highly amused when they asked her what it was and got the reply "it's my Huawei". Her attempt at pronunciation is something a bit like "hughie", to Russian speakers that sounds much like a slang word for an important part of a gentleman's anatomy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Dick-to-phone...

      "Can I use your Dick-to-phone?"

      "No, use your finger like every one else"

      Old Bernard Manning joke (before mobiles).

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