Honor brings the low-priced 6X stateside, but you’ll have to wait for Nougat

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Published 4 Jan 2017

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Huawei offshoot Honor has been making steady inroads in the U.S. over the past year, releasing the Honor 5X Honor 8 with an eye on bringing premium features to the budget midrange markets. That strategy seems to be paying off, now the company is bringing the 6X stateside, too.

Released in China in October, the successor to the 5X brought a number of improvements. apped in the same all-metal body 5.5-inch 1080p display, the hset included a Huawei-made Octa-core Kirin 655 (with four cores clocked at 2.1GHz another four at 1.7 GHz), up to 4 GB of RAM, an 8Mfront-facing camera, as well as a dual-camera system, all for less than $200.

The U.S. model, which is available for purchase today, keeps those same impressive specs, including 32GB or 64GB of storage, a microSD slot, a giant 3340mAh battery. ke the 5X, Honor is targeting “the cost-conscious yet uncompromising Internet-minded millennial” with the 6X, with a starting price of $249, it’s certainly putting its money where its motto is.

honor 6x 2

The Honor 6X features a dual-camera system, but the second shooter is just 2M

The flagship feature is the dual camera system—rarely seen in a smartphone at this price—that seeks to mimic the ione 7 us’s lauded portrait mode. However, while the primary shooter is 12M the secondary depth-of-field camera is just 2M but as the company points out, the system’s wide f/0.95 aperture helps to create “professional-looking background blur to make your subjects st out.” The camera app also features an array of filters as well as a something Honor is calling ase Detection Auto Focus technology, a fancy name for fast focusing.

On the software side, the Honor 6x runs the company’s Emotion UI 4.1, which is still built on the Marshmallow architecture. at’s more, Honor is saying that the Nougat-flavored version 5.0 (which is already running on the Mate 9), won’t arrive until the second quarter of 2017.

y this matters: The U.S. smartphone market is still very top heavy, with flagships like the Galaxy S7 ’s xel scooping up most of the attentions sales. However, budget-minded phones like the 6X the Oneus 3T are beginning to challenge the notion that you need to spend a bundle to get a great phone.