Honor 7 Dubai launch: Watch Sketchy Andy bend rules of gravity [video]

Chinese e-brand Honor, an online-only brand of Huawei, yesterday took the wraps off its flagship Honor 7 smartphone, a high-end device available in a mid-market price range.

At the launch in Dubai’s ArtSawa gallery, Honor showed that it strived to be different in its devices and the way it markets them, as well as in the way it unveils its new phones.

While most smartphone manufacturers have previously unveiled their flagships in 5-star settings, Honor chose to fly in champion slackliner Andy Lewis, who walked across the slack rope while delivering his speech that focused on why one needed to be brave to be successful.

The smartphone manufacturer even made the guests walk the slack rope (thankfully, only a few inches above the ground and with support) at the evening event.

 

Honor7 front-(supplied)

Of course, it ties in nicely with Honor’s tagline (For the Brave) and its ambition - this young brand (2 years old) aims to achieve a 10 per cent share of the regional market by the end of this year.

“We’re on track to meet our target of selling 40 million units in 2015, and a revenue of $5 billion,” said Chris Sun Baigong, Vice-President of Huawei Honor in the Middle East. That’s double the number of phones Honor sold last year (20 million) and more than double its 2014 revenues ($2.4b).

The firm is pinning its hopes on Honor 7, which Baigong said was targeted at the young and brave at heart. “Honor by its nature is a digital native,” he said, as the manufacturer sells its products online “to avoid the costs of the middleman.”

Watch the video of champion slackliner Andy Lewis, better known as Sketchy Andy, walking the slack line at Dubai’s ArtSawa gallery in front of a packed audience, repeating "I can, I will, and I want" a few times while pacing up and down the slack line 9even squatting on it on a couple of occasions) before swinging down.
 

 

The new Honor 7 device will be available for sale in the Middle East at Dh1,399 from 18th October. Consumers who pre-register on HonorArabia.com for a promo-coupon will get a Dh150 discount to use on their first Honor 7 purchase on Souq.com.

Being touted as a flagship-killer, the mid-range Honor 7 has established its supremacy in the Android domain by generating (almost) as much hype as the venerated iPhone.

Huawei revealed earlier this year that the Honor 7 received a record 9 million pre-orders within a period of seven days just from China, and the smartphone sold out in just one day in Europe.

Read: Huawei Honor 7 sneak preview: The iPhone-killer arrives in UAE

George Zhao, President of Huawei’s Honor Business Unit, told Emirates 24|7 that the online-only strategy was working winders for the brand.

“The e-commerce platform is a perfect platform for us, and we haven’t had to offer discounts to our customers – the quality of our products has seen us double our sales revenues every year since our launch,” Zhao told this website at Honor’s global headquarters in Shenzhen, China.