Huawei Announces Honor 8X With 6.5-inch Display, 91% Screen-to-Body Ratio, Kirin 710 SoC

Huawei is bringing its big and budget-minded Honor 8X smartphone to the United States after having launched the handset in China a few weeks ago. The pitch from Huawei is that the Honor 8X offers "all-around flagship features at an unrivaled price," and that begins with a premium 6.5-inch FullView display with a 91 percent screen-to-body ratio.

As is a growing trend, the Honor 8X is another device to adopt a notched design. Not all smartphones have a notch, though until smartphone makers figure out a way to embed the front camera into the display itself (or have it pop up from the top of the phone), we expect this will be the norm for a great many phones.

The display on the Honor 8X has a 2340x1080 resolution (19.5:9 widescreen aspect ratio), which means it packs 397 pixels per inch. This is powered by a Kirin 710 octa-core processor consisting of four ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.2GHz for the heavy lifting and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz for less strenuous tasks. For graphics, the phone leans on a Mali G51 GPU.

There are various SKUs available with 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. All of them sport a microSD card slot for expandable storage, up to 400GB.

"With the newly unveiled Honor 8X, Honor is setting out to hit new benchmarks in terms of balance between value, design and performance. Honor 8X doesn’t just meet the needs of our customers, it represents a stunning leap forward in smartphone technology, tearing down old conventions on what is possible, while keeping a strong focus on design aesthetics," Honor president George Zhao said. "Honor 8X is a beautiful embodiment of minimalism, an eye-catching exemplar of achievement and ingenuity that demands attention. It’s a trailblazer which demonstrates that flagship features do not require comprise."

Hyperbole aside, it's certainly an attractive handset, based on the press renders we've seen and our time spent with the regular Honor 8. Like that phone, the Honor 8X appears to adopt a shiny reflective body that scatters light. Huawei says it's a 2.5D double texture aurora glass body.

For taking photos, the Honor 8X boasts a 16-megapixel front-facing camera, along with a dual-camera arrangement on the back consisting of 20-megapixel and 2-megapixel lenses.

Huawei didn't announce a price, though in China the Honor 8X sells for around $200.