Huawei Eyes Lucrative U.S. Market With $250, Unlocked P8 Lite Smartphone

Huawei, a major mobile phone player in the China, is looking to give the competition a run for their money on U.S. soil. The easiest way to do that is by offering a well spec'd smartphone at a reasonable price, and most would agree that the company's new and unlocked P8 lite handset fits the bill. From the pictures we've seen, it's a nice looking phone, and at $250 outright, it's a fair bit cheaper than flagship handsets from the likes of Samsung, HTC, and Apple.

The overall design looks like someone spliced the DNA of an iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and any modern Android handset. It's rectangular in shape with rounded corners and measures a scant 7.7 millimeters. The P8 lite also has an extremely narrow bezel -- just 2.75 millimeters. That's virtually an edge-to-edge display, which sits nicely on the unibody frame.

Huawei P8 Lite

The display itself is 5 inches, though the resolution is only 1280x720. That gives Huawei the right to pitch phone as a high definition handset, but that's not as impressive now that phones have scaled well beyond even Full HD.

Powering the display is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC consisting of eight Cortex-A53 cores, four of which are clocked at 1.5GHz and the other half running at 1GHz. The P8 lite also boasts 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage + microSD card slot, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, 5-megapixel front camera, 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, and a non-removable 2200 mAh battery. On the software side, it's running Android 4.4 KitKat.

Overall the specs are a bit underwhelming compared to phones like the Galaxy S6/S6 Edge and iPhone 6S/6S Plus, but for the price, it's not a bad deal. Huawei isn't pitching the P8 lite as a flagship phone, either -- word around the web is that it will come out top-shelf handset later this year to compete on the high-end.