Huawei’ sub-brand Honor has introduced a new smartphone whose headline is a little bit different from what we are normally used to. The smartphone is able to read your body temperature simply by holding it in front of your face or wrist.

This may sound odd mostly because there is no other smartphone with this feature. But at such time when we are in the middle of a pandemic, this would prove to be a really useful tool., Honor says that the phone can read temperatures between -20 degrees Celsius and 100 degrees Celsius through the thermal sensor situated at the camera module.

The phone did launch in two models; Honor Play 4 and Honor Play 4 Pro with the sensor being featured in the latter alone.

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The standard model packs MediaTek’s Dimensity 800 processor alongside a 6GB RAM and 128GB of storage space. On the other hand, the Pro version comes in with Huawei’s in-house Kirin 990 processor and 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

Surprisingly, the Pro version houses only two camera lenses (40MP + 8MP) while the base model comes in with a quad-camera setup consisting of a 64MP primary camera, an 8MP wide-angle lens, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 2MP macro camera.

The Honor Play 4 also features a 6.81-inch TFT full HD+ display with 20:9 ratio. The Play 4 Pro version is oddly the smaller one with a 6.57-inch LCD screen with 20:9 aspect ratio as well. Both devices run on Android 10 as the base but do not have any Google services considering they still belong to Huawei.

The Honor Play 4 Pro that comes with the inbuilt thermometer launched at a starting price of about KES 30,000 (CNY 1999). Meanwhile, Honor Play 4 is set to be cheaper selling at around KES 27,000 (CNY 1799).

Honor smartphones aren’t really what you would call common in the Kenyan market so our chances of seeing them in stores are pretty slim. It would, however, be interesting to see other rival brands integrate a similar thermal sensor in their own budget smartphones and hopefully launch them in the country.