Honor View 10, Honor 7X US-bound for under $500 and $200
Huawei's midrange Honor phones are classy and affordable. Time to get in on the action.
FOMO is real. Luckily, you can kick your fear of missing out of Huawei's affordable, classy-looking Honor phones -- because they're both coming to the US.
At the annual CES show in Las Vegas, the company announced that the Honor 7X will sell for $199 (roughly converting to £150 and AU$255), to be followed later in 2018 by the Honor View 10, which will cost under $500 (roughly £370 and AU$640). Sorry, we're not exactly sure when the Honor View 10 will come to the US, but it starts selling in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and India on January 8.
An offshoot brand of Huawei, Honor phones are often value buys with solid specs that dip below the top of the line, compared to Huawei's top models like the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. Honor phones sometimes contain overlapping specs with Huawei-branded devices, but for a lower price. Huawei, the world's third-largest smartphone maker behind Apple and Samsung, continues to expand its portfolio of midrange and high-end devices.
Red Honor 7X fans the flames
First, the Honor 7X. We've reviewed it in deep blue, a color we often see on Honor phones, and it also comes in black and gold. It looks great, and helps give the handset some visual pizzazz. $200 is a phenomenal deal, too. You'll be hard-pressed to find many competitors with a 5.9-inch display and dual rear cameras (other than the Motorola G5 Plus).
I'm going to go on a limb here and say that the Honor 7X is even better in red. You can only find 200,000 of the limited-edition red shade in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia and India. And yep, you guessed it, it's a plug for Valentine's Day sales.
The 7X's unibody metal phone makes a statement, especially compared to every other black or silver device on the market. You could say the color is there to distract from the more modest hardware features, but the Honor 7X more than holds its own as a budget model.
It's got that big screen, slim bezels and a fingerprint reader on the back that also doubles as a shortcut key you can program to launch other apps and tasks. Plus, there's a microSD card slot (up to 256GB external storage), 64GB of internal storage and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera to go along with those 16-megapixel rear lenses. About the only thing that would make this even better for the price is some sort of water- or splash-resistance.
When it comes out, you can find it on HiHonor.com, as well as on retailers that pick it up.
Honor View 10 boosts the power
Next up, the Honor View 10 is a 6-incher with a fingerprint sensor on the front, rather than the back. With 8 cores of processing might, it also packs in 6GB of RAM, which will help keep it running fast and smooth. That's the same internal setup as the much pricier Mate 10 Pro, which is rumored to also come to the US, one that rated very well in our processor tests.
The View 10 also gets a bump above the Honor 7X in the camera department, with 20- and 16-megapixel rear cameras to go along with that 13-megapixel selfie shooter on the front.
Unfortunately, it isn't splash-proof either, but that's a nice-to-have, not need-to-have when you're looking at affordable phones.
See: All the new products from CES 2018
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