Honor Debuts Magic9 Series as HIMA Launches Zhijie RX; Anthropic Ships Claude Sonnet 5.5

The Magic9 Super Edition carries a 6.81-inch screen, a fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite platform, Honor's Dongfeng turbine cooling system and the third-generation in-house C3 radio frequency chip. It has an 11,000 mAh battery with 80W wired and 50W wireless charging, IP68, IP69 and IP69K dust and water resistance, and a rear setup of a 200MP main camera, 50MP telephoto and 12MP ultrawide. It comes in four colors and starts at 4,499 yuan for 12GB+256GB, or 3,999 yuan after the national subsidy.

The standard Magic9 has a 6.37-inch screen and the same Snapdragon 8 Elite platform, with imaging developed with ARRI and Honor's in-house H1 image chip. Its rear cameras are a 200MP ARRI telephoto with a 1/1.56-inch sensor, a 200MP ARRI main camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor and a 50MP ultrawide, plus a 1:1 square full-frame front camera. It is the first to support the ARRI LogC3 video pipeline and all 87 official ARRI looks, and works with the Honor G200 teleconverter. The battery is 8,000 mAh with 80W wired and 50W wireless charging and the C3 chip. It starts at 4,999 yuan for 12GB+256GB, or 4,499 yuan after subsidy.

The Magic9 Pro Max uses a 6.8-inch black diamond display with reflectivity as low as 1.5% and a sixth-generation Snapdragon 8 top-tier platform. It pairs ARRI imaging and the H1 chip with a 200MP ARRI periscope telephoto with a 1/1.4-inch sensor, a 200MP ARRI gimbal main camera with a 1/1.28-inch sensor rated CIPA 8.0 and a 50MP ultrawide, plus a 3D depth front camera and a 1:1 square full-frame front camera. It introduces a cinematic directional microphone and supports the G500 and G200 teleconverters and a HONOR SmallRig video cage. The 8,800 mAh battery supports 100W wired and 80W wireless charging, and the phone offers 3D ultrasonic fingerprint and 3D face recognition. It starts at 6,499 yuan for 12GB+256GB.

The MagicPad 4 12.1-inch tablet has a 165Hz LCD eye-care display, a fourth-generation Snapdragon 8s platform and a 10,100 mAh battery, starting at 3,299 yuan for 8GB+256GB. The Watch 6 Pro has a 1.5-inch dual-layer OLED screen with 5,500 nits peak brightness and 4,500 nits global peak brightness, cardiac arrest detection and active SOS, blood pressure monitoring, and Honor's Polaris positioning system with a dual-frequency, three-antenna design. It is rated 5ATM, IP68, IP69 and IP69K and offers up to 10 days of typical Bluetooth use, starting at 1,699 yuan in five colors.

HIMA's Zhijie RX is an electric SUV measuring 1,585mm tall and 2,007mm wide, with 255mm front and 275mm rear tires. High-strength steel and aluminum make up 90.5% of the body, which has a lightweight coefficient of 1.53, torsional rigidity of 51,040 N·m/deg, 32.4m braking from 100 km/h and a 0-100 km/h time of 3.6 seconds. It uses Huawei's 800V silicon carbide platform with a front motor revving to 21,000rpm, a top speed of 251 km/h and a permanent-magnet rear motor with 98.2% peak efficiency and torque response of 1ms or less. A 100kWh ternary battery provides 852km of CLTC range and charges from 30% to 80% in 15 minutes. It also has a 26-inch HUD, a four-way movable central screen, the ALPS health cabin and a 622L trunk, priced from 259,800 to 389,800 yuan.

The updated Zhijie R7 adds dual 17.2-inch 3K screens, dual zero-gravity seats and a new HUD, two new exterior colors and four new interior options, a 106L frunk and an 852L trunk, up to 855km of CLTC range and a 896-line dual-path image-grade HUAWEI ADS 5 lidar, priced from 239,800 to 319,800 yuan. The Xiangjie V8, a family flagship MPV previewed with pre-orders open, measures 5,335mm long, 2,005mm wide and 1,805mm tall on a 3,250mm wheelbase, with 3,697mm of cabin space, a 674L trunk and a Huawei ceiling screen. It has an all-aluminum chassis, 510mm wading depth, 200mm ground clearance, standard ±12° rear-wheel steering and a 5.09m turning radius, plus an 800V pure electric and range-extender platform, a 120kWh battery, 830km of CLTC electric range and an L3 autonomous driving architecture, with pre-sales from 329,800 yuan.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 for everyday office work, code fixes and the creation of documents, slides and spreadsheets, available on multiple platforms. Output speed rises more than 30% versus Sonnet 5 and per-task cost falls by up to 30%, while pricing stays at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cache reads at $0.20. The company attributed the cost reduction to fewer tokens needed per task. It said Sonnet 5.5 scored 70.6% on the Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding test, compared with 10.3% for Sonnet 5, and trailed Opus 5.5 by two points on the GDPval-AA occupational task test. Haiku 5.5, aimed at high-volume and cost-sensitive uses, is planned for the coming weeks.

AMD said it plans to acquire World Labs, the AI company led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. The companies have reached a final agreement and the transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval. After closing, Li will become AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and CEO Lisa Su, while the World Labs team continues AI model research. World Labs develops spatial intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, along with robot learning and simulation technology. AMD said the acquisition will help it understand computing needs in reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI and shape its hardware, software and systems roadmaps.

Manus released Manus 2.0, built on a new agent framework called Cascade, upgrading its desktop application into Manus Studio and adding a standalone personal agent app, Cue. Manus Studio adds video editing and game development environments, letting users alter AI-generated footage, audio tracks and animations on a timeline before having AI continue from those edits, while game projects allow manual editing of code, assets and scenes and publishing as web games. Users can buy a dedicated cloud computer for continuous operation, and automation expands from scheduled execution to event triggers responding to email, Slack messages and Notion updates. With authorization, Manus can also operate files and applications on a computer from phone instructions. The company said Cascade cut token use by 23.2%, task time by 28.2% and running cost by 32% in tests compared with the previous system. Cue gives an agent its own email address, phone number, wallet and computer, supports multi-agent group chat collaboration and budgeted payments, and is in invite-only free early access, with its iOS version awaiting App Store review.

AYANEO announced the KONKR Pocket BLOCK retro handheld with a MediaTek Helio G85 chip, a 3.33-inch 4:3 LCD screen at 960x720 resolution and 360 PPI, microSD support, USB 2.0 Type-C and 3.5mm ports, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0. It runs Android 12 with the company's AYASpace retro game management software, offers 2GB or 3GB of RAM and a 3,500 mAh battery, measures 113.2x77.4x19.8mm and weighs about 165g. It comes in purple, gray and white, starts at $79 overseas and ships from late October.

In other brief items, Google said it will hold its Android Developer Summit on Oct. 28 and 29, with the detailed schedule containing keywords including Android 18. Qualcomm senior vice president and phone general manager Chris Patrick said in an interview that the company is closely evaluating the potential use of Samsung's 2nm process in future products. The Denuvo cracking group DenuvOwO disbanded, with a source saying the decision was influenced by a lawsuit filed by Denuvo developer Irdeto against cracker voices38. Google confirmed ChromeOS devices will be supported through mid-2034, and that "many" Chromebooks can later upgrade to Googlebook OS, without specifying models or requirements. Google also confirmed Gemini Gems will be retired on Nov. 17 and fully replaced by Skills, which is available only to paying users.

Editor's Summary

Honor's Magic9 lineup, MagicPad 4 and Watch 6 Pro and HIMA's Zhijie RX, refreshed R7 and Xiangjie V8 preview led a Sept. 28 slate of hardware announcements in China. Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5, AMD's roughly $8.2 billion plan to buy World Labs and Manus 2.0 rounded out the day's AI and agent news. The combined launches put new flagship phones, electric vehicles and agentic AI models on the market within the same window.