According to a posting on the FCC’s official website, the Federal communication regulator has now cleared the Honor Play 5X from Huawei, for sale in the US. The device comes with the identifier KIW-L22, and was launched last month in Huawei’s home market of China at a price of just 999 Yuan ($157) for its base variant. It is still not clear when Huawei plans to bring the device stateside, but seeing as it has already been in circulation in China for a month, the FCC certificate should pave the way for the Chinese electronics and telecommunications equipment giant to introduce the handset to American audiences sooner rather than later.
Coming to the hardware specs of the phone, the device is a mid-ranger from Huawei that features a 5.5-inch 1080p display panel and comes in two different versions. While the base version comes with just the 2 GB of RAM, the more premium variant sports 3 GB. Both variants however, come with just 16 GB of built-in storage, although, the handset does allow users to expand storage capacity with the help of a microSD card of up to 128 GB in capacity. The Honor Play 5X is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 MSM8939 chipset, which comes with an integrated 64-bit octa-core CPU that’s clocked at a maximum of 1.5 GHz, along with an Adreno 405 GPU that takes care of all the graphics processing needs of the smartphone.
Coming to the imaging options available on the device, the primary rear-facing camera comes with a 13-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 aperture and 28mm wide-angle 5P lens. As for the front-facing selfie-cam, there’s a 5-megpixel camera available on the handset. The Honor Play 5X carries a 3,000 mAh battery and comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the box, with Huawei’s proprietary Emotion UI (EMUI) 3.1 running on top. The device also comes with a fingerprint scanner on the back. As for connectivity options, the handset supports LTE, HSPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS etc. and is offered in Sunset Gold and Silver Dawn colors. The pricing, as mentioned already, starts at a surprisingly affordable 999 Yuan ($157) for the 2 GB version, whereas the more premium 3 GB variant can be bought for 1,399 Yuan ($220).
