Huawei Honor 3X: affordable octa-core 5.5-inch phablet with dual-SIM

Though better known for its Ascend smartphone line, Huawei also has its Honor series of affordable handsets. One of the company’s latest additions to this other sub-brand is the Huawei Honor 3X, a dual-SIM phablet powered by an octa-core processor.

The announcement came only a few months after Huawei unveiled the Honor 3, a mid-range device with modest specs and resistance to dusts and water. The Huawei Honor 3X, on the other hand, is one of the very first to come equipped with MediaTek’s 8-core MT6592 CPU. Based on Cortex-A7 architecture, it’s a capable chip with decent performance, having achieved a respectable Antutu score of 30,000-ish.

At 720p HD, the IPS LCD’s screen resolution may be a little bit low to some people, although Huawei asserts its difference to 1080p is not particularly discernable (unless you squeamishly look at every pixel). Besides the apparent negligible visual disparity, the company claims using 1080p would be more taxing to the battery by as much as 20 percent.

Huawei Honor 3X Specs

• Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
• 5.5-inch IPS LCD (720×1280 HD), ~267ppi
• 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6592 processor
• Mali-450 GPU (to be verified)
• 2GB RAM
• 13-megapixel main camera, with autofocus and LED flash
• 5-megapixel front camera
• 3G, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
• GPS, A-GPS
• 3000mAh battery

The Huawei Honor 3X also touts a 13MP rear-facing camera with f/2.2 aperture, along with a 5-megapixel front shooter. Users should be able to take several images and videos with the battery’s capacity of 3000mAh. Moreover, the smartphone is notable for having a dual-SIM configuration (one using the more popular mini-SIM format and the other using the smaller micro-SIM), both slots of which support 3G connectivity in both WCDMA and China-only TD-SCDMA networks. Last but not least, there’s an in-call noise cancellation employed in the dual-mic system, accompanied by DTS audio support.

No launch date has been set for the Huawei Honor 3X, although pre-orders in China will already begin tomorrow. The off-contract price is estimated to be just $280, which is around Php12,300 in today’s exchange. Expect the actual device to cost higher when considering custom taxes, though.

[Source: Weibo]