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Embarking on an AI-driven Smartphone Photography Journey

Smartphone photography has undergone an immense revolution in the past decade, placing in consumers’ hands the kinds of powerful image technologies that were once only possible with full-frame cameras. With a steadfast commitment to providing users around the world with the best-in-class photography experience, HONOR has always been at the forefront of smartphone photography, kept challenging itself to set new industry benchmarks for innovation and quality. With smartphone usage scenarios continuing to diversify, from portrait photography to telephoto imagery and quick snapshots, more users expect versatile photography capabilities from a single device. Understanding this evolving demand, HONOR has dedicated efforts to fine-tune both the hardware and software components of its smartphones to ensure unparalleled image quality.
Recognizing the pivotal role of AI in enhancing photography capabilities on the software front, HONOR has been refining its HONOR Image Engine over the years. Debuting in 2021, the first-generation HONOR Image Engine leveraged HONOR’s AI computing photography algorithm, seamlessly blending images captured by different lenses to yield clearer and sharper results. Subsequently, with the introduction of HONOR Image Engine 2.0, HONOR unveiled the Millisecond Falcon Capture and Ultra-fusion Computational Optics functionalities, employing AI to enhance imaging speed and quality. Upholding the belief that photography is the artistic interplay of light and shadow, HONOR masters in smartphone photography through understanding and refining the technology with AI. To this end, HONOR introduces the pioneering AI HONOR Image Engine enhanced with large model capabilities, the industry’s first on-device plus cloud large model empowered mobile imaging system. Integrated into the HONOR Magic7 Series, this meticulously reconstructs light and shadow intricacies in each image, offering users a host of advanced photography features.
The AI HONOR Image Engine is bolstered by three specialized large models. The Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model excels in optimizing static scenes; the Telephoto Enhancement Large Model allows users to capture detailed, sharp images with AI-enhanced resolution; the Capture Enhancement Large Model is specifically designed for seizing motion shots, improving the overall photography experience for users. Catering to diverse shooting needs, these large models work seamlessly together to deliver a comprehensive suite of enhanced features covering various shooting needs, spanning from action shots and portraits to telephoto shots. Through these innovations, the HONOR Magic7 Series revolutionizes image quality with advanced AI innovations, providing users with an immersive and cutting-edge AI photography experience.
Mastering Light and Shadow: Unrivaled Portrait Excellence
Striving to transform smartphone portrait photography, HONOR has seamlessly integrated the Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model and Telephoto Enhancement Large Model into the AI HONOR Image Engine, introducing a range of portrait features including AI-enhanced Portrait, All-scenario Harcourt Portrait, AI Super Zoom, and Stage Mode.
AI-enhanced Portrait and All-scenario Harcourt Portrait or Unmatched Portrait Quality
Presenting the brand-new AI-enhanced Portrait feature, users can now capture exquisite portraits with ultra-high definition across a focal length of 1X to 6X. Driven by the Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model, this feature integrates AI Resolution Enhancement to refine image quality, meticulously reducing noise through lens optical calibration, real noise modeling, and extensive AI neural network training. It dynamically adjusts pixel arrangement based on different lighting conditions, preserving original resolution with low ISO in well-lit environments, while seamlessly blending pixels in low-light conditions to form larger units and enhance light intake for superior image clarity.
Crafted to elevate portrait quality amidst challenging lighting conditions, the AI-enhanced Portrait incorporates cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance dynamic range and optimize the interplay of light and shadow. Powered by advanced AI algorithms, the dynamic range is boosted, resulting in more authentic and nuanced color transitions. Complementing this advancement, the AI light and shadow reconstruction capability introduces a new AI algorithm that reconstructs light and shadow elements through highlight recovery and precise color corrections, ensuring consistent light intensity for smoother brightness transitions in photographs. These enhancements come together to greatly benefit users capturing portraits in challenging lighting situations, such as sunset or night scenes, delivering natural portraits with balanced highlights and intricate details.
With the Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model, HONOR has unveiled the Stage Mode to capture performance moments for music festival and concert scenarios. Given the complexity of performance lighting, including challenges like strong light and backlighting, the Light and Shadow Portrait Large Model dynamically optimizes brightness levels and light and shadow details for static moment shots. With Stage Mode, users can effortlessly capture memorable performance moments spanning a focal range of 1X to 10X, creating photos with vivid colors, refined exposure while ensuring that the primary subject of the performance stands out prominently.
Furthermore, featuring an AI-enabled portrait enhancement capability that is trained on millions of high-definition DSLR portrait images, AI-enhanced Portrait can precisely adjust the portraited person’s skin tones and enhance intricate facial features like hair and eyes. Additionally, the AI-enabled bokeh effects leverages AI capabilities to replicate the bokeh effects of real optical systems, enabling users to capture portrait with foreground bokeh effects using AI-enhanced Portrait. This innovation facilitates a seamless transition from foreground bokeh to 3D light spots, ensuring a delicate shift from blurred backgrounds to sharply focused subjects.
In addition, AI HONOR Image Engine also empowers the All-scenario Harcourt Portrait, ensuring studio-like image quality at varying distance. With the AI bokeh effect and AI light and shadow Reconstruction, users can capture breathtaking portraits with natural bokeh effects and facial light and shadow intricacies, rivaling the results of professional cameras. Moreover, the All-scenario Harcourt Portrait now boasts a new 6X focal length, providing enhanced flexibility for smartphone portrait photography. At this extended focal length, Harcourt Portrait excel in capturing captivating portraits that accentuate the subject’s beauty. Thanks to AI-enabled facial refinement, it automatically refines the subject’s natural skin texture while preserving their authentic characteristics.
Enhancing Versatility with AI Super Zoom for Scenery Capture
The HONOR Magic7 Pro boasts the HONOR AI Falcon Camera Systems featuring a pioneering 200MP Telephoto Camera with the advanced 1/1.4” telephoto sensor and a large f/2.6 aperture. To achieve professional telephoto lens standards, HONOR has crafted a proprietary structure for this camera. This innovative design includes a dual lens group with an aspherical lens that aids in reducing stray light, minimizing dispersion, and enhancing overall optical performance.
By merging cutting-edge hardware with the Telephoto Enhancement Large Model on cloud, HONOR introduces the groundbreaking AI Super Zoom feature, designed for framing the breath-taking beauty of sceneries including natural landscape. This feature enables remarkable focal lengths ranging from 30x to 100x along with AI-enhanced resolution, allowing users to capture detailed, sharp images even at significant distances. The Telephoto Enhancement Large Model on the cloud is capable of driving 12.4 billion parameters data to enhance image quality and generate vivid details at high speed. To achieve this, the cloud large model processes data 1270 billion for each shot.
Advancing Intent Recognition for Precise Movement Capturing
Tailored for diverse motion scenarios, the AI HONOR Image Engine seamlessly integrates the Capture Enhancement Large Model, enhancing the image quality of moving scenes through AI Motion Sensing Capture and HD Super Burst. With the incorporation of an AI-enabled intent recognition engine boasting advanced recognition and analysis capabilities, the AI Motion Sensing Capture excels in capturing accurate motion shots by identifying and analyzing subject movements. Through capabilities like subject detection and facial evaluation, this engine swiftly recognizes various shooting subjects, from humans to beloved pets like cats and dogs, while discerning subtle facial expressions and body gestures, enabling users to effortlessly capture cherished moments with their companions using AI Motion Sensing Capture.
Acknowledging the increasing popularity of sports photography, HONOR has consistently advanced its hardware and software to improve capture speed and image clarity, empowering users to capture professional sports image.
Additionally, the new HD Super Burst feature enables users to capture rapid sequences at 10 frames per second, expanding opportunities for snapshot photography on smartphones. Whether it’s capturing a leisurely jog or thrilling sports events such as a swimming competition, the feature enables the camera to swiftly detect and predict the movement of shooting subjects, empowering users to capture moments with unparalleled clarity and precision on every shot, regardless of the setting or intensity of the action.
Summary
HONOR is steadfast in its mission to redefine the standards of AI excellence within smartphone photography, striving to provide users with the utmost intelligent capturing experience. Powered by the potent AI HONOR Image Engine, the HONOR Magic7 Series empowers users to embark on a holistic AI-centric photography journey, catering to the varied and evolving photography needs of users. Pioneering groundbreaking advancements in smartphone photography, HONOR stands out as the first smartphone manufacturer to seamlessly fuse the capabilities of cloud AI and on-device AI within mobile imaging, underscoring its unwavering dedication to establishing new benchmarks within the industry.
Tech News
Nothing Raises $200M Series C to Power the Next Phase of Consumer AI

Today, we’re announcing new funding––USD $200M in our Series C round at a USD $1.3B valuation. This milestone marks the start of our next phase: From being the only independent smartphone company to emerge in the last decade, towards building an AI-native platform in which hardware and software converge into a single intelligent system.

Building the foundations for the future
When we started Nothing, we had a thesis that if we could build a smartphone business at scale and own the last-mile distribution point in consumer tech, we would be well-positioned for the next technology shift. Although we didn’t know what that would look like at the time, the opportunity is now crystal clear.
From the start, we knew that the foundation had to be an end-to-end value chain
capable of delivering products at speed, scale, and quality. As we’ve seen from many others that have tried, building a hardware company is hard. There are many potential failure points and almost no room for error. For us, it required assembling a team that balanced a pragmatic approach of rapidly launching products, with an innovative mindset to deliver experiences that our community would immediately love.
Today, the foundations are firmly in place. From award-winning design, to our global manufacturing and supply chain network built for quality and cost. In four years, we have shipped millions of devices, began 2025 crossing $1B+ in total sales, while growing 150% in 2024.
Building this infrastructure has been the hardest and most valuable thing we’ve done so far. With the support of our community, we’re fortunate to have made it here. Today, we’re in a position that will be very hard to copy: The ability to launch any consumer hardware product from start to finish within months, go-to-market operations that can ship and service worldwide, a global user community that co-creates with us, all without the innovator’s dilemma or bureaucratic constraints that the incumbents face. On to chapter 2.
Operating systems, evolved
In the last 18 years, the smartphone became ubiquitous. It is the primary personal computing tool to manage the countless tasks of daily life. Beyond its distribution scale, what makes the smartphone the most powerful consumer device in the market is its unmatched access to contextual information and user knowledge. For this reason, I believe the smartphone will remain one of the most important devices in the AI era.
On the other hand, while AI has made revolutionary progress in the last three years, the smartphone experience has barely evolved. Most of the innovation has been underwhelming, limited to incremental improvements in photo editing, translations, and assistant features that barely work.
For AI to reach its full potential, consumer hardware must reinvent itself alongside it. This is the opportunity we see for Nothing. We see a future where operating systems are significantly different from the ones today. Each system will know its user deeply, and be hyper-personalised to each individual. Interfaces will adapt to our context and needs. Suggestions will surface naturally, and once we confirm an intent, agents will execute on our behalf. The system will handle the non-essential for us, allowing us to focus on what truly matters, which will be different for every person. Unlike today’s one-size-fits-all solution, a billion different operating systems will be rendered for a billion different people.
Over time, this OS will be transversal across all form factors: We’re starting with smartphones, audio products and smart watches, devices that people already use every day. In the future, our OS will carry into smart glasses, humanoid robots, EVs, and whatever comes next.
Why we are uniquely-positioned to create this future: Owning the last-mile distribution point with all its contextual and user knowledge is essential to developing an OS that will help people in their daily lives. An AI OS that doesn’t know its user and isn’t ever-present can’t deliver a hyper-personalised experience. This is the next chapter for Nothing, integrating an AI experience into our hardware devices to reinvent how technology amplifies us.
The next billion unit scale product
In the near-term, we believe that the smartphone will remain the only device shipping at billion-unit scale each year. But soon, we’ll all be carrying an additional device that will be just as important. In the coming years, we’ll learn that the more context we can feed our AI, the more useful it becomes. The smartphone, while powerful, can’t always be there for us. Sometimes it’s in our pocket, or we might be on the move with our hands full.
A new class of AI-native devices will emerge. Products that are available to the user at the moment of need, paired with intelligence that turns understanding into action. This is a very exciting time, imagining devices that capture context across modalities and generate interfaces on demand, shaped by what the user is trying to accomplish.
We have been hard at work imagining what this future could look like, and can’t wait to launch some of our first AI-native devices next year.
Our Series C capital raise
This funding round allows us to execute on this vision by accelerating our innovation roadmap and further scaling our distribution. Our round was led by Tiger Global, with significant support from existing shareholders GV, Highland Europe, EQT, Latitude, I2BF, and Tapestry, alongside new strategic backing from Nikhil Kamath and Qualcomm Ventures.
Alongside this Series C, we’re also preparing to launch our next Community round giving our supporters another opportunity to become part of Nothing’s journey. More details will be shared soon.
As we continue our journey, we do so with huge gratitude to our community, our team, and our partners. This next chapter is only possible because of you.
Carl, CEO and Co-founder of Nothing
Hospitality
Dave’s Hot Chicken Lands in Abu Dhabi!

Dave’s Hot Chicken, the cult-favorite LA-born brand known for its Nashville-style hot chicken, has officially landed in Abu Dhabi with the grand opening of its newest branch at Marina Mall. This highly anticipated launch marks the brand’s debut in the capital, bringing its bold flavors and signature heat to one of the UAE’s most vibrant culinary hubs.
Walid Hajj, CEO of Lavoya Group, stated: “We’re incredibly excited to open our doors in Abu Dhabi, especially in a landmark location like Marina Mall. This marks our first location in the capital, and it’s a significant milestone for the brand’s journey in the UAE. The response to Dave’s Hot Chicken across the UAE has been overwhelming, and expanding into the capital is a natural next step in regional growth. We’re here to bring fans our crave-worthy menu, while also introducing new audiences to the bold experience that defines Dave’s Hot Chicken.”
The Abu Dhabi launch reinforces Lavoya Group’s commitment to catering to its growing fan base across the UAE and expanding its presence in key markets. With a continued focus on accessibility and innovation, the new Marina Mall branch is strategically positioned to serve both residents and tourists in the heart of the city.
Known for its Hot Chicken Sliders, Tenders and Dave’s Bites, the brand offers a build-your-own-heat experience with seven spice levels, from No Spice to the infamous Reaper, a fiery challenge that even comes with a signed waiver. Sides like creamy Mac & Cheese, fresh Kale Slaw, Top-Loaded Fries, and loaded milkshakes round out the menu, making it a destination for flavor seekers of all kinds!
The Marina Mall branch delivers the unmistakable Dave’s Hot Chicken vibe. Designed to welcome both groups and solo diners, the space offers energetic indoor seating alongside a relaxed outdoor area, perfect for everything from weekend hangouts to mid-shopping fuel-ups. This opening marks another milestone in the brand’s UAE journey, with more exciting expansions on the horizon, including a second Abu Dhabi location set to open soon in Yas Mall.
Home Integrator
LUMENA by OMNIYAT Sets a New Benchmark with Business Bay’s Highest Sales Value and Complete Sell-Out

OMNIYAT, the leading developer in Dubai’s luxury real estate landscape, has announced that LUMENA by OMNIYAT is now fully sold out. Unveiled on June 18, 2025, the ultra-luxury commercial development, located on Sheikh Zayed Road in the Burj Khalifa district, completed the sale of its last available space within just two months of launch.
With this impressive sales success, OMNIYAT has established its leadership in the ultra-luxury commercial real estate sector, as this latest milestone follows the recent success of ENARA by OMNIYAT, which is also fully sold out following its launch in Q2 2025. With ENARA establishing a benchmark, LUMENA has elevated expectations even further, setting a new standard for commercial luxury in Dubai.
At its initial launch, LUMENA by OMNIYAT, the ultra-luxury commercial office tower achieved Business Bay’s highest total sales value at AED 3.4 billion, underscoring the robust demand for premium workspaces in Dubai as UHNWIs from across the world continue to relocate to the city for its prosperous, business-friendly economy and elevated lifestyle offering.
Sitting at the intersection of Business Bay and Downtown Dubai, LUMENA by OMNIYAT is a work of architectural mastery, boasting signature features such as the never-before-seen Sky Theatre, and unparalleled amenities catering to the needs and desires of UHNWIs. The 48-storey tower will set a new benchmark for workplace environments in the region upon its completion in Q4 2029.
Mahdi Amjad, Founder and Executive Chairman at OMNIYAT, said: “As Dubai emerges as a global hub for the world’s elite, the success of LUMENA validates our vision to offer breathtaking spaces that raise the bar for what our clients can expect from their working and living environments. This exceptional project reflects OMNIYAT’s ongoing commitment to shaping the commercial landmarks of tomorrow, with more milestones to come.
Unparallelled amenities, five-star service
As part of OMNIYAT’s portfolio of luxury residential, commercial and hospitality properties, superior service is built into the core experience. A full suite of service offerings includes a dedicated concierge, reception, meeting room management, spa and wellness coordination, lifestyle bookings, personal services, and bespoke experiences, such as event planning, luxury travel arrangements, and private shopping. These services are managed by OMNIYAT and draw from the brand’s experience in delivering high-touch hospitality across its award-winning commercial towers, residences and hotels, including ENARA by OMNIYAT, and The Opus by OMNIYAT.
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