Honor unveiled its "Alpha Plan" strategy at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, signaling a shift in direction for the company as it positions itself as an AI-first brand.
Honor unveiled its Alpha Plan strategy at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, signaling a shift in direction for the company as it positions itself as an AI-first brand. With a $10 billion investment over the next five years, Honor is doubling down on artificial intelligence with the intent to integrate it deeply into its ecosystem of devices. The plan represents a blueprint for how Honor intends to enhance the interplay between users and its devices, with a heightened focus on agentic AI—systems designed to take proactive, multi-step actions on behalf of users. While the company stopped short of revealing specific products during its presentation, it teased the development of an "intelligent phone" that promises to redefine human-to-device interaction.
The intelligent phone concept is central to Honor's Alpha Plan and highlights the company's partnership with Qualcomm and Google Cloud. This collaboration underscores Honor's commitment to creating a smartphone experience that goes beyond traditional functionality. Honor laid out its vision of how agentic AI will work on its devices with an example that showed how its agent could make reservations through specific apps while cross-referencing the user's calendar and other spoken details. Honor sees this vision of AI as not only being about convenience but also creating an intuitive digital assistant that anticipates and acts on the user's needs. Honor aims to set itself apart with this agentic vision at a time when AI is quickly becoming a standard feature of smartphones.
Another important aspect of the Alpha Plan is the intelligent ecosystem that Honor is looking to build around its devices. To that end, the company introduced "AiMage", a new branding for its AI-powered imaging capabilities. Among its features are AI upscaling for restoring poor-quality photographs, an AI eraser for removing unwanted objects from images, and AI outpainting, which can expand an image beyond its original boundaries.
Honor also showcased its AI Super Zoom technology, which demonstrated usable results with a 100x cropped zoom image enhanced by the device's post-processing algorithms. Perhaps most intriguing, however, was the announcement of deepfake detection capabilities. The on-stage example demonstrated how the operating system could determine whether an incoming video call is being conducted by a real person or an AI-generated avatar. Honor also revealed that the new technology will come first to the Magic7 Pro and Magic V3.
Beyond its focus on AI, Honor made headlines with its elevated commitment to long-term software support. The company announced an extended seven-year update promise for its devices—a full two years more than its previous guarantee. This puts Honor in the same ballpark as Samsung and Google in offering Android's most supportive OS update plans. It also aligns with the broader trend of the company's commitment to sustainability and device longevity.
Honor's new CEO, James Li, articulated a vision for interoperability across different operating systems as part of the Alpha Plan. This strategy aims to simplify tasks like file sharing and create a more seamless user experience across multiple platforms. By fostering collaboration between devices running different operating systems, Honor hopes to break down barriers that continue to hinder ecosystem integration.
The overarching theme of Honor's announcements at MWC 2025 was clear: the company is fully embracing artificial intelligence as the foundation of its future growth. Honor is making a strong case for why it deserves attention in an increasingly crowded tech landscape. With the Alpha Plan announcement, Honor is setting ambitious benchmarks for what consumers can expect from their devices in the coming years.
Disclosure: Jason Howell's travel expenses and lodging for Mobile World Congress 2025 were covered by Honor, though Honor has no influence over the editorial content.
