Huawei unveiled the Honor 30S based on the its new mid-range chipset – the Kirin 820 5G SoC at a launch event in China. The new chipset, which is expected to rival Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G, offers up to 27% performance upgrade over the Kirin 810 SoC using the same 7nm process and octa-core architecture.
The Kirin 820 5G SoC has four ARM Cortex A76 big cores (3 cores clocked @ 2.2GHz, 1 clocked higher @ 2.36GHz) and four ARM Cortex A55 little cores (all 4 clocked at 1.84GHz). The Mali-G57 hexa-core GPU on-board offers up to 38% performance improvement compared to the Mali-G52 GPU on the Kirin 810 and supports both Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 and GPU Turbo. For flagship level performance, the chipset uses an in-house NPU for improved AI performance and the Kirin ISP 5.0 plus BM3D SLR on the Kirin 990.
The Honor 30S is the first smartphone to be released from the upcoming Honor 30 series and first to be powered by the Kirin 820 5G chipset. It packs 8GB LPDDRX4 RAM, 128GB/216GB UFS 2.1 storage, side-mounted fingerprint sensor, USB-C 2.0 port and supports dual-mode SA/NSA 5G networks thanks to the built-in Balong 5000 5G modem. Photography is handled by a quad-camera arrangement headed by a primary 64MP sensor paired with an 8MP telephoto sensor with 3x optical and up to 20x hybrid zoom, 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens and 2MP depth sensor.
The device has a 6.5-inch FHD+ LTPS display with a 16MP selfie camera in the punch-hole notch and 4,000mAh battery with 40W fast charging. Pricing starts at CNY 2,399 for the 8GB + 128GB variant and CNY 2,699 for the 8GB + 256GB variant. It will go on sale starting April 7 in Black, Gradient White and Green colour choices.
