Huawei may be the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world after Samsung and Apple, but it hasn’t been able to replicate its phenomenal success in China and Europe in the US thus far. However, if the Chinese telecom equipment and consumer electronics major has its way, that is about to change soon, as the company plans to target the lucrative US market with newer offerings, which will include new smartphones from its Honor sub-brand. As per its publicly announced roadmap, Huawei introduced one of its newer offerings for the US – the Honor 5X, at its CES 2016 press event on Tuesday. What’s interesting is that the mid-range device is now already up for pre-order on Amazon and Newegg within a day of its introduction in the country. For the uninitiated, Huawei’s Honor range of smartphones represent a more affordable lineup of handsets from the company, and the Honor 5X fits the bill nicely as a high-spec’d, well-designed, pocket-friendly smartphone.
Coming to more details regarding the listing on the two e-commerce sites, the unlocked, SIM-free version of the device is listed on both sites at $199 only, and is currently being offered in 3 color options – dark grey, daybreak silver and sunset gold. According to the company, the phone will launch January 31st, when it will also be available on Huawei’s own dedicated website, HiHonor.com, along with the two third-party online retailers mentioned above. Huawei is also giving its customers the chance to win some free merchandise including a brand new Honor 5X handset, by registering their e-mail IDs to get promo codes for its Honor Engine headphones.
Taking a quick look at the Honor 5X, the device features a 5.5-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display panel that comes with a 1080p resolution. The smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 SoC that comes with an octa-core CPU clocked at a maximum of 1.5 GHz and an Adreno 405 GPU. The handset comes with only 16 GB of storage out of the box, but there is a microSD card slot that can be used to expand its storage capacity by up to 128 GB. As for the available RAM, there are two versions available globally, with one sporting 3 GB while the other, carrying only 2 GB. It is this 2 GB version that is now up for pre-order, with no word on if and when the higher spec’d version will be made available in the US. The phone also sports a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front shooter, and comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) laid on top.
Honor 5X