Huawei will launch its new Osta sub-brand on Friday 20th November 2026 at 2:30pm Beijing time. Richard Yu, who chairs Huawei’s consumer business, announced the date on Weibo on 11th November alongside a poster for a joint event with Huawei’s Stelato V8 electric minivan. Weibo labelled Yu’s phone “OSTA O1 Pro”, which confirms the wide-screen model we first reported last week. Huawei still hasn’t named the standard Osta O1.
Osta’s Chinese name is Xingmang, which means starlight. It’s a separate brand under Huawei aimed at younger buyers. Its official Weibo account went live on 11th November and published its first teaser video the next morning with the slogan “Come As You Are” (“you have your own light” in Chinese). Yu and Huawei consumer chief executive He Gang both reposted the clip from Osta O1 Pro phones. Yu wrote that Huawei wants to explore new AI possibilities through the brand, and He Gang said the aim is to make AI understand users better. Neither explained what those AI tools do.
What to expect from the Osta O1 Pro and Osta O1
Going by the leaks we covered last week and a front render shared on 9th November, the Osta O1 Pro is a wide phone that doesn’t fold. Most phones have tall, narrow screens of around 20:9. The O1 Pro uses a wider 16:9.5 aspect ratio on a flat 6.39-inch 1.5K OLED screen with 1.05mm bezels, the border around the display, so documents and videos fit with smaller black bars. That matches Huawei’s Pura X View, which we covered in August and which starts in China at USD 900, or about KES 117,000.
The O1 Pro should cost a bit less than the Pura X View by making two cuts. The Pura X View has a 50MP periscope zoom camera, which bounces light sideways inside a thin phone for 3.7x optical zoom. Leaks say the O1 Pro drops the periscope lens and keeps a 50MP main camera in a horizontal bar on the back. Its screen is also said to use LTPS transistors, which leak current and keep redrawing 30 to 60 times a second even on a still page. That uses more battery than an LTPO screen, which can slow to once a second. On memory, the top O1 Pro goes higher: a leaked photo of its box shows 16GB of RAM, the working memory apps run in, and 1TB of storage, while the Pura X View stops at 12GB of RAM.
The standard Osta O1 is tipped to be a regular-shaped phone with a screen curved on all four edges, a round rear camera module with a 50MP main camera, and a 7,000mAh battery with 100W charging. Both phones are expected to run HarmonyOS 7 on a Kirin 9000-series processor, Huawei’s high-end chip family used in phones like the Pura 90 Plus we covered last month. Last week’s leaks said Osta would sell mainly online, but a 10th November update from the same tipster says Huawei will also put the phones in its physical stores in China. Early stock of the O1 Pro is said to be small, so the 16GB RAM versions will only sell online while the 12GB versions go to both online and offline shops.
Why Osta is drawing comparisons with Honor
Osta is Huawei’s first new phone sub-brand since it started Honor in December 2013 for younger buyers and sold it in November 2020 when the US trade blacklist cut off its chip supply. Huawei’s trademark filings for Osta also cover laptops, tablets, smartwatches, smart glasses, earphones and chips. When a blogger asked Honor global marketing chief Guan Haitao on 12th November whether Osta would hurt Honor’s sales, he replied on Weibo: “Welcome Xingmang, let’s shine together! The biggest meaning of this is that it lets everyone know Honor is Honor, an Honor that dares to think and be different.”
Huawei still hasn’t given prices or said whether Osta will sell outside China. In Kenya, software is the main catch if you import one. Huawei’s Chinese phones run HarmonyOS 7, which can’t run standard Android apps unless developers rebuild them, while models sold here, like the Pura 90s Pro Max, run Android-based EMUI without Google services. Unless Osta gets a global EMUI release, importing an O1 Pro only makes sense if your daily apps are on HarmonyOS and the price next Friday comes in well below the USD 900 Pura X View.
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