The mobile industry has been desperate for years to improve its cameras. Honor believes having found the key

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to try the Honor 400 Pro. It is a mid-high-end phone with the focus on mobile photography. So far, there is nothing especially surprising. But if I tell you that this phone sets the bases of a Honor who does not believe that the future of photography is in the hardwarebut in cloud computing, things may change.

In Xataka we have been able to talk to Luo Wei, Chief Imaging Architect of Honor. He is the one in charge of leading the photography part, applied to it and super zoom in honor, and ex-huawei. And someone who is clear that to win the smartphone career you have to win the AI ​​race. If marketing sounds like you can be calm. It is not, it is the vision of the future of a giant who aspires to conquer Europe.

Honor wants to lead in Europe, and wants to do it with ia

To understand why AI for honor in phones is so important and not misunderstand it as a marketing exercise, it is necessary to know the relevance that the company has with its Alpha plan. In March 2025, the company revealed a investment of 10,000 million dollars In five years to promote artificial intelligence on their devices and display your first AI agent, in association with Qualcomm and Google.

The objective is clear: lead the AI ​​agents in the mobile ecosystem and be the main reference in this race. At the moment, he will do it hand in hand with these two partners in Europe.

It is also relevant to understand that this plan has a lot to do with The position of honor in Europe and how it aspires to conquer our market, more than a proposal centered purely on your native country. With counterpoint data in your hand, Honor is the brand that grows most in shipments in Europe in an interannual wayand wants to continue pushing leading the functions of AI.

In China, its AI approach is different, deeper and more local. There the partner is not Google Cloud, they are national giants like Alibaba (Qwen + Wanxiang), Baidu and Tencent Clouddeepening much more in your Yoyo assistant and hand with Depseek.

All of AI

One of the pillars of this plan, in addition to the creation of the first agriculture for smartphones, is Aimage. Landing the term to the tangible: the high -end phones of honor process the photographs in the cloud to “improve them”. And about this there are many questions. The first is why.

Here Luo Wei states that, historically, Mobile photography has been limited by hardware. A limitation that according to Honor can only be overcome using cloud computing, especially for tasks such as image restoration, provide movement (turn into short video) static images or improvements in the zoom.

Being more concrete, 12,500 million processable parameters for its cloud model vs. 3,000 million parameters with which current hardware can deal. Adding to this point the possibility that stresses honor of updating its algorithms via Ota.

It’s something we have talked about in Xataka: We have been watching a stagnant industry at the photographic level and with a clear physical limit when improving your hardware. Currently, there are no larger sensors.

The second point is in the democratization of functions such as Super Zoom (Zoom improved with AI) on devices beyond its flagship. Creating a cloud platform from which you can drink lower ranges models allows you to honor an experience similar to that of a high range in cheaper models.

“The algorithms have been increasingly improving since December last year, when this function had just left. And if you compare the future with what is now, five months later, you can see that the cloud -based algorithm is updated every two weeks is becoming remarkably more real.”

For honor it is also especially important The improvement margin through updates that allows AI. Honor takes it seriously: they update it every two weeks. The key here is not alone in time, it is in how. System updates can be installed or not, depend on storage space and hardware requirements. Luo says that, using the cloud, they could update the algorithm daily if they wanted and access to it would be immediate.

The second great unknown has to do with profitability. Using Google’s cloud sounds good, But someone has to pay it. Here is surprising the transparency of Luo, who explains that honor is still debating what the business model will be and if they will end up charging users or not to use these services in the cloud.

Here, Luo explains that honor does not pay for users or requests, but for QPS (consultations per second). In other words, for the ability of users to access the cloud service, and thus their costs do not depend on user behavior.

It is, currently, its way of making this business sustainable, although it makes it clear that it is something that is being worked on and discussing internally.

Betting everything to the cloud brings an inevitable question, What happens to the privacy of users. Honor explains that its AI cannot be used without prior consent of the user (it appears from the configuration assistant), and secondly, that all photographs that are uploaded to the cloud to be processed are eliminated after being treated.

On the future of photography, Luo closes with a metaphor. At the beginning of the history of automotive, the gearbox was manual. Subsequently, it went to automatic changes and, today, We are already talking about autonomous driving. And yet, we still need drivers.

For honor, the AI ​​will allow any user, regardless of their degree of skill, obtain the best photograph in any scenario. For expert users, it will be a co-pilot in editing functions, elimination of elements and post-foto work.

Image | Honor

In Xataka | Honor 400, Analysis: If you are looking for a mid -range mobile to take photos, here is a serious contender