Honor is set to launch its first smartphone series after being sold by Huawei in November 2020. The Honor 50 series has been announced to launch on June 16th; it will come with Google Play Services pre-installed and run a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. But even months after being separated, the upcoming Honor phones share a stark design similarity with the teased Huawei P50 Series as per the official renders as well as leaked images.

Honor's Bhavya Siddappa shared a teaser on Twitter yesterday, announcing the launch date of the Honor 50 series. In addition to the launch date, the image also reveals how the Honor 50 series will look — and we bet we have seen something like this before. The four cameras on the phone are accommodated in two big circles. What is presumably the primary camera takes up the entire upper circle while three smaller sensors and a flash can be seen located on the circle below. The design is reminiscent of the upcoming Huawei P50 series phones, which leaked multiple times before Huawei confirmed this design itself, earlier this month.

Besides the design, the tweet also confirms that the Honor 50 series will come with 100W fast charging. In addition, we know that one of the smartphones in the series will feature Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 778G mobile platform, while all of them will come with Google Play Services and other Google apps pre-installed.

The images teased by Honor also coincide with multiple images of the phone that leaked on Weibo (via Slashleaks). There are a number of colors including a glittery silver (confirmed by Bhavya in another tweet) and a shiny (seemingly) rose gold.

Images of Honor 50 prototype and retail units leaked on Weibo

Despite being separate from Huawei, this similarity between the leading smartphone series of the two brands suggests that the Honor 50 may have been in the design and planning phase much before Honor departed and became an independent company. There cannot be any other explanation since Honor's sale included all of its assets including R&D arm, supply chain, and a workforce of more than 7,000 employees. Due to no longer being associated with Huawei, the US government's restrictions do not apply to Honor's smartphones.

Huawei's business and innovation suffered significantly when it was put on the entity list by former US President Donald Trump's administration. This prevented Huawei, along with its former sub-brand, to engage with US-based companies including Google. This, in turn, debarred Huawei from using the licensed version of Android, and the company eventually lost support for Google apps like Gmail or Google Maps on its devices. Finding it difficult to sustain its smartphone business, Huawei sold Honor to a then-newly incorporated company, Shenzen Zhixin New Information Technology, a conglomerate of 40 smaller tech companies.