Honor has overhauled its smartphone strategy to become an “AI device ecosystem company,” and is working on a new type of an intelligent smartphone that will feature “purpose-built, human-centric AI designed to maximize human potential.”
The company’s new CEO, James Li, announced the move – dubbed the Honor Alpha Plan – at MWC 2025, calling on the smartphone industry to “co-create an open, value-sharing AI ecosystem that maximizes human potential, ultimately benefiting all mankind.” Talk about ambition.
This Alpha plan consists of three steps, each catering to a different ‘era’ of AI: namely the Agentic AI era, the Physical AI era, and the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) era. The first, Honor says, concerns the development of a “super intelligent” smartphone, which the company will create in collaboration with various partners including Qualcomm and Google.
Honor teased various new software tools as part of its presentation – including AI Upscale and an cross-OS file-sharing technology (yes, that means compatibility between iOS and Android devices) – that will feature on its upcoming devices. Some, like AI Upscale, will come to the recently released Honor Magic 7 Pro, too.
For the so-called Physical AI era, Honor hopes “the industry” can work together to create an AI ecosystem and get the very best out of this potentially paradigm-shifting technology. “I call on the industry to be truly open so that we can fully embrace this exciting AI future. Let’s do it together,” Li said on stage at MWC. Sure, that’s more than a little vague (does ‘the industry’ mean rival smartphone manufacturers?) but Honor is supposedly investing more than $10 billion into this cross-collaboration idea, so the company is certainly committed to the cause.
Finally, the AGI era will welcome “the co-existence between carbon-based life and silicon-based intelligence,” according to Li. AGI refers to Artificial General Intelligence, an as-yet-unrealized type of AI that matches human cognitive abilities. AGI follows ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence), which refers to AI designed to perform specific tasks, and precedes ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), which refers to AI that’s, ahem, smarter than humans (think Skynet and HAL 9000 – those famously non-threatening systems).
Jokes aside, Honor’s cross-collaboration ambitions are well-founded. The last few years has seen smartphone manufacturers and software companies large and small develop genuinely experience-enhancing AI tools (consider Samsung’s Live Translate tool and Honor’s own Deepfake Detection feature), but they’re scattered across the industry and between devices.
Pigs might fly before Apple and Samsung talk to one another, but Honor’s call to action will no doubt attract the attention of smaller companies with the expertise to accelerate the AI revolution.
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