Once a brand under the Huawei Consumer Business Group, Honor is now a separate entity, owned by Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., Ltd. The break-up with Huawei allowed Honor to free itself from the shadow of U.S. sanctions and begin to restore a normal course of business. The company has already launched several new products since the split with Huawei was made official. These include the Honor V40 5G smartphone, the Honor Band 6, and the MagicBook Pro 2021 laptop. While Honor has historically relied heavily on Huawei’s R&D, future Honor products won't enjoy the same privilege. This is especially true for Honor smartphones as they can no longer rely on HiSilicon Kirin chips. In an attempt to diversify its product portfolio, Honor is now turning to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips for its upcoming premium smartphones.

Qualcomm earlier today unveiled the upper mid-range Snapdragon 778G SoC, and Honor has confirmed its upcoming Honor 50 series will be powered by the new chipset.

"Through close collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies, the Snapdragon 778G Mobile Platform will power our brand-new HONOR 50 series, which will set a new design benchmark for HONOR, and deliver a transformative experience for our users," said Fang Fei, president of product line dept., HONOR Device Co., Ltd.

Earlier in January, Honor had inked partnerships with several chipmakers, including Qualcomm, so this development doesn’t come as a surprise. Honor pretty much has no choice but to use Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek chips. Huawei's HiSilicon division is no longer able to make high-end ARM chips since they were cut off from contract chipmakers like TSMC and Samsung thanks to U.S. government intervention.

Honor hasn't confirmed a launch date for the Honor 50 series yet, but it shouldn't be too far away. Rumors have it the lineup will consist of three phones: the Honor 50, Honor 50 Pro, and Honor 50 Pro+.