Honor staked a claim to three world first technologies set to launch with its View20 flagship smartphone.

Although it previewed the device itself, global availability is scheduled for late January 2019. It will debut sooner in China, however, using the V20 moniker.

The headline feature is the 48MP rear camera (with Sony IMX586 sensor), which it said offers high definition photography on a smartphone, with “more and better” detail even when zoomed in. This tops the 41MP camera previously used in Nokia’s 808 PureView and Lumia 1020 PureView smartphones (and the 40MP of Honor parent Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro), following a number of years when vendors have focused on more than just boosting pixel count to improve performance.

Indeed, the company pointed out that when coupled with the dual-ISP and dual-NPU of the HiSilicon Kirin 980 chipset, View20 can perform multi-frame image processing, enabling it to “collate the essence in multiple photos” in to a single image.

Also new is the Honor All-View Display, which integrates the front camera into the display area of the screen, extending the diplay area to “almost 100 per cent”. The company said the “extremely complex 18-layer technology stack” is the result of its “unmoving dedication to the evolution of the full view display”, following the earlier shrinking of bezels and adoption of a notch.

And the third innovation, Link Turbo, uses artificial intelligence and big data technologies to “automatically analyse users’ usage models and network conditions to switch seamlessly between Wi-Fi or 4G networks and boost downloading speed by simultaneously adopting both networks”.