The biggest difference between the Honor 30S, which is a premium mid-ranger, and the rest of the Honor 30 series lineup, is the Kirin 820 5G SoC. Although not as potent as the Kirin 990 SoC, the Kirin 820 5G still packs eight CPU cores, spread into single 2.36GHz Cortex-A76, three 2.22GHz Cortex-A76, and four 1.84GHz clocked Cortex-A55 cores, as well as the Mali-G57 MP6 GPU.

The SoC is paired up with 8GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of internal storage.

Premium design with aluminum frame and glass back

The Honor 30S packs a 6.5-inch FHD+ (2400x1080 resolution) IPS screen with HDR10 support and has an all-glass back with an aluminum frame. It measures 162.3 x 75 x 8.6 mm and weighs 190g, which is not bad considering its design and the fact it comes with a rather hefty 4,000mAh battery. Bear in mind that it also supports fast 40W charging.

You also get a USB 2.0 Type-C port, side-mounted fingerprint sensor, all the usual connectivity including 802.11ac dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.1, and 5G.

Honor decided to equip the new Honor 30S with a main quad-camera system, featuring a main 64-megapixel sensor with PDAF, placed behind a 26mm wide lens with f/1.8 aperture, one 8-megapixel sensor behind 17mm ultrawide lens with f/2.4 aperture, another 8-megapixel sensor with autofocus and 3x optical/20x hybrid zoom placed behind an 80mm telephoto lens with f/2.4 aperture, and dedicated 2-megapixel depts sensor.

The front camera features a 16-megapixel sensor behind a wide lens with f/2.0 aperture.

So far, the Honor 30S will only come to China with a price set at CNY 2,399 ($340) for the 8GB/128GB version and CNY 2,699 ($380) for the 8GB/256GB version. It is available in standard black, blue, green and gradient color options. It runs on Android 10-based Magic UI 3.1.1 and, as expected, does not ship with Google Mobile Services.