Honor Play 4 PRO, the smartphone that also works as a thermometer

The Chinese manufacturer has come up with a system to take advantage of the smartphone's infrared camera to measure people's temperature. Here's how it works

The next Honor Play 4 won't have Google apps, being a smartphone from the Huawei group, but it will be able to measure our temperature. Because, as Honor itself has confirmed, it will be equipped with an infrared camera. This is the first electronic device for the general public that offers such a feature and, in times of Covid-19, all this takes on a very different nuance.

Unveiled yesterday, the new Honor Play 4 range will go on sale starting June 9 in China, and will then arrive in the rest of the world. In reality, however, the infrared sensor will only be available on the Honor Play 4 Pro, a mid-range device but extremely competitively priced for the technical features offered. It's not surprising, given the timing, that the temperature measurement has been widely publicized by Honor: the Huawei sub-brand, in fact, has shown in a video how simple and "safe" it is to use its smartphone as an infrared thermometer. To measure the temperature with the Honor Play 4 Pro, in fact, it takes just a few seconds and does not require physical contact.

Honor Play 4 Pro: how the thermometer works

The temperature measurement via the Honor Play 4 Pro can be done on objects, animals and people. Just bring the smartphone close to the thing or person and, within a few seconds, the temperature will be detected. Get close and don't touch, that's the most important thing right now in China, where even consumer electronics bigwigs are trying to lend a hand in containing the coronavirus pandemic.

Honor Play 4 and Play Pro: the other features

The Honor Play 4 range consists of two very different smartphones. The regular Play 4 has a 6.81-inch LCD screen and 60 Hz refresh rate and mounts the SoC MediaTek Dimensity 800 and 6/8 GB of Ram and 128 GB of storage memory. The Play 4 Pro has a 6.57-inch screen, is instead equipped with the much more powerful HiSilicon Kirin 990 (the same as the Honor 30 and Honor 30 Pro, to be clear), accompanied by 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. The regular Play 4, then, has a quad rear camera: 64 MP main, 8 MP wide-angle, 2 MP macro and 2 MP depth sensor. The front-facing one, on the other hand, is 16 MP. The Play 4 Pro, on the other hand, has a dual 40 MP sensor, accompanied by an 8 MP tele (3X zoom with optical stabilizer), and the famous IF sensor.