Honor aims to deliver first 5G phone in 2019, make the top 3 globally by 2022

Everyone is preparing for the arrival of the 5G networks next year. Almost all major brands have pledged to deliver a 5G ready smartphone in 2019 as China, the USA and other countries are looking to launch their next-generation networks that will drive the AI and IoT to new heights.

And Honor makes no exception. During an INS Conference in Hong Kong, the president of Honor, George Zhao, said that the company will be ready to deliver a 5G-capable smartphone next year. As a man who's coming from the telecommunication carrier's business and has seen the shift from 3G to 4G network, he believes that three levels of contribution are needed.

The first one is the patent initiators such as Huawei while the second one is all the companies that are involved in promoting the network development like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Huawei, etc. And thirdly, smartphone companies based on 5G solution providers and the development of 5G applications.

It's probably not a big surprise that next year's Kirin 980-powered Honor handsets will be 5G ready featuring the in-house made Balong 5000 modem. Yet, we wonder if the new Honor Magic 2 will be 5G ready because the phone is expected to arrive by the end of 2018 while Honor repeatedly says 2019 will be the year of 5G phones.

Riding the 5G wave, Honor hopes it will be in the top 5 smartphone brands by 2020 and in the top 3 by 2022. That's fairly ambitious but won't be that surprising, considering the insane growth Honor achieved in 2018. But surely, some companies will be left out as there are limited seats on the 5G train and everyone is hoping to take advantage of the new technology.