Huawei’s Honor brand today unveiled its flagship handset for 2017 and successor to the Honor 8: the Honor 9. Featuring an aluminium chassis and a curved glass at the front and back, the Honor 9 makes use of 15 layers of glass for its rear panel with a shiny finish. 

The handset features a 5.15-inch 1080p IPS LCD with DCI-P3 color support. The capacitive home button featuring a fingerprint scanner sits right below the display, with two capacitive navigation buttons flanking it from each side.

Like with other handsets from Huawei, the Honor 9 makes use of the company’s own octa-core Kirin 960 chipset running at 2.4GHz. This is paired with 4/6GB RAM, 64GB storage, and a secondary hybrid microSD/SIM card slot. All this is powered by a 3200mAh battery that supports Huawei’s own quick charging method.

The rear of the Honor 9 sports a primary 12MP shooter paired with a 20MP f/2.2 monochrome secondary sensor. It lacks OIS or a Leica branding but it does come with Honor’s new image processing algorithm that uses pixel binning in low-light scenarios to help improve photos. The dual camera setup is paired with dual-LED flash and LaserAF sensor. An 8MP shooter is located at the front for one’s selfie needs.

On the software front, the Honor 9 runs on Android 7.0 Nougat with Huawei’s Emotion UI 5.1 on top of it. The company has optimised its skin in recent times for improved performance and usability.

The 7.45mm thin handset will be available in Glacier Grey, Sapphire Blue, and Midnight Black colors. It will go on sale in the UK and Europe from early July at a price of £379.99 and €449.99, respectively. Three will also be selling the phone exclusively in the UK on contract, though details of that will be revealed closer to the phone’s availability. Huawei has already made it clear that it does not plan on bringing the Honor 9 to the US.