The Honor 8 has officially launched in the United States, bringing increased competition to the $400-level "affordable flagship" segment. Owned by Chinese tech giant Huawei, Honor intends to challenge the likes of OnePlus among younger people and tech-savvy phone buyers with an impressive glass and metal design, impressive internals and a competitive price point. Throw in some serious pomp and ceremony — and celebrity brand ambassadors like Brooklyn Beckham — and you've got a notable product launch during what is turning into a very busy summer for smartphones. But beyond the launch-day hype and beautiful hands-on photos, what really matters about the latest from Huawei and Honor? Let's dive in with some first thoughts. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines

1. It should actually be a good phone — because it's based on a good phone! Instead of metal you've got glass. Instead of Kirin 955 you've got 950 (and thus slightly lower CPU speeds). And you don't get a gazillion LTE bands out of the box. But by all other metrics the Honor 8 is basically a Huawei P9, and that's a good thing. The P9 family — in particular the P9 Plus, with its 4GB of RAM — is the best we've seen from Huawei. Unlike the Honor 5X, we should get decent performance out of Honor 8's combination of Kirin 950, 4GB of RAM and Android 6.0 Marshmallow — paired with Huawei's EMUI software layer. As of version 4.1, EMUI is faster and less objectionable than it's ever been, with many annoying traits like over-the-top icon customization finally going away for good. MORE: The top 6 tweaks you need to make to your Huawei or Honor phone 2. Kirin in the U.S. is really important The Honor 8 is the first phone to ship in the United States with a Kirin processor, designed and manufactured by the Huawei-owned HiSilicon. The benefits of using your own silicon in your own phone are obvious — more vertical integration means Honor (or Huawei, if you prefer) doesn't need to rely on Qualcomm's roadmap as it has for previous U.S. launches. As for why we haven't seen Kirin in the U.S. before, that's likely due to the challenges in getting the chip certified for use in America. In recent years the U.S. legislature has criticised Huawei's apparent ties to the Chinese government, and thus geopolitics will inevitably come into play when it comes to any homegrown processor from the manufacturer. With the imminent arrival of the Honor 8 in the U.S., it would seem these issues have been largely resolved. Kirin 950 might not be as fast as the very latest chips from Qualcomm (in our testing it falls somewhere between a Snapdragon 652 and the newest 820), but it's a capable processor, and something that gives Honor (and Huawei) phones a unique hardware feature to boast over rivals in the $400-450 price point. 3. 4GB of RAM is huge