Huawei’s Honor sub-brand will make its U.S. debut with the mid-level Honor 5X — coming Jan. 31 for $199.
We’ve known for a few weeks that Huawei’s Honor brand would be launching in the United States in the near future, and now we know that the first device to hit American shores will be the mid-range Honor 5X.
More: Hands-on with the Honor 5X
The Honor 5X shares a lot of design DNA with the brand’s current global flagship, the Honor 7, though some hardware tweaks have been made to hit what will presumably be a lower price point. At the heart of the 5X there’s a Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It’s running Android 5.1 Lollipop and Huawei’s EMUI 3.1 software, so you’ll get a similar experience to what’s offered by phones like the Honor 7 and Mate S. And like those phones, Huawei’s packed in its best-in-class fingerprint reader too.
Solid mid-level hardware to launch the Honor brand in the United States.
The company’s also bringing metal construction to this mid-range product, with a “diamond-polished aluminum alloy casing” and a profile that bears a striking resemblance to the Honor 7. And with a 1920×1080-pixel screen resolution over 5.5 inches, the 5X offers a bigger — if slightly less pixel-dense — display compared to that phone. There’s a slightly smaller battery, however, with the 5X packing an internal 3,000mAh cell.
When it comes to imaging, the Honor 5X offers a 13-megapixel rear shooter with Huawei’s SmartImage 3.0 processor, which is designed to improve image clarity in darker conditions. Around the front, there’s a 5-megapixel sensor behing a 22mm wide-angle lens with an 88-degree viewing angle and f/2.4 aperture.
On paper, the Honor 5X seems like a solid product to launch the Honor brand in the United States. But as always, we’ll have to wait until we’ve had some hands-on time with the device before we’ll know for sure.
The phone will launch Jan. 31 for $199.99 unlocked on Huawei’s HiHonor.com as well Amazon. That’s a tempting price for a relatively high-specced phone, and we’ll be watching with interest to see how American consumers react.
MORE: Honor 5X specs