Bargain alert: Grab a Valentine’s Day Honor 6X bundle for $250

We liked the new Honor 6X so much, we awarded it our best mobile device award at this year’s CES technology event. Here’s everything you need to know about it, including news of special offers and prices.
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Why it matters to you

A metal smartphone with a dual-lens camera that only costs $250? That’s the Honor 6X, and you need to know about it

Huawei’s Honor phones have always been strong competitors at their budget price points. Last year’s Honor 5X delivered exceptional cameras, a metal unibody, and a powerful processor for a palatable $250. At the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huawei’s keeping a good thing going with a new Honor phone — the Honor 6X.

How to buy one

Pricing starts at $250 for the Honor 6X 3GB and $300 for the Honor 6X 4GB. However, Honor regularly holds flash sales and sweetens the deal with special offers, so always check to see what’s available through the company’s own online store before buying one.

More: Our review of the Honor 6X

At the time of writing, there’s still time to pick up the Honor 6X as a special Valentine’s Day bundle, which will get you the phone and an Honor selfie stick, a case, and a pair of Honor Engine earbuds for $250. The offer is only found on Honor’s own online store.

In the United Kingdom, the 3GB/32GB Honor 6X costs 224 British pounds through Huawei’s vMall online store, or it can be purchased on Pay As You Go, or with a monthly contract with Three U.K. It’s priced at 200 British pounds on PAYG, or with monthly tariffs starting at 16 British pounds.

The Honor 6X comes in gold, silver, and gray. In addition to the United States and the United Kingdom, the phone is sold in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

What you need to know about the Honor 6X

The Honor 6X was not a mystery, exactly. It launched at an October 2016 press event in China. But Huawei’s broadening its availability in January, beginning with the U.S. and Europe and expanding to other regions in the coming weeks.

More: Lenovo Moto Z and Z Force review

It’s a beauty to behold. The slim, sleek Honor 6X boasts a unibody aluminum design that weighs 162 grams and a curved glass edge that measures a mere 8.2mm in thickness. The display, a 5.5-inch full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) panel of the LCD variety, reaches 450 nits and has a 0.3-second response time — a 42 percent improvement from previous Honor models.

Under the Honor 6X’s machine-polished hood sits Huawei’s custom Kirin 655, an octa-core processor comprised of four high-powered cores clocked at 2.1GHz and a second set of energy-saving cores at 1.7GHz. A tertiary i5 coprocessor handles lighter tasks like speech recognition, music playback, sensor processing, and location tracking. Both are paired with up to 4GB of RAM and internal storage managed by Huawei’s smart file system, which automatically prevents file fragmentation and optimizes read and write speeds.

Three cameras

The Honor 6X’s silicon is not the only highlight. Huawei’s new handset packs a rear camera with a 1.25μm pixel size, built-in noise reduction algorithms, and a Sony sensor capable of honing on subjects in 0.3 seconds. And it’s the first in the Honor series to pack a dual-sensor rear camera; a 12-megapixel sensor handles color data, while an adjacent 2-megapixel monochrome snapper measures brightness levels. Its software combines the two to produce an image that Huawei says is much brighter and crisper in low-light conditions than your average phone camera.

More: Huawei’s Honor to launch modular smartphone with no speaker or camera

The dual-sensor design allows for other effects, too. The Honor 6X’s camera can refocus (within an aperture value of f/.95 to f/16) on subjects in the foreground after the picture has been taken, and automatically convert pictures to monochrome. Huawei’s accompanying software supports low-light shots, long exposure, and custom filters.

The front-facing camera and fingerprint sensors are nothing to scoff at, either. The Honor 6X’s 8-megapixel front camera features a 77-degree lens for wide-angle selfies and a built-in “Beauty” mode that recognizes and fixes blemishes. The Honor 6X’s fingerprint sensor also supports swipe gestures; swiping left and right flips through pics in a photo album, for instance, while a series of taps snoozes alarms and places calls.

All that technology is rather energy efficient, luckily. The Honor 6X’s 3,340mAh battery should last up to two days on a single charge, Huawei says, or up to 11.5 hours of video, 70 hours of music, and eight hours of gaming. And it supports 5V/2A power delivery, meaning fast recharge times.

The Honor 6X launched on the eve of the Honor brand’s third anniversary, which now reaches more than 74 different countries and regions, and topped $6 billion in global sales in 2016.

Article originally published in October 2016 by Kyle Wiggers. Updated on 02-13-2017 by Andy Boxall: Added in latest Honor offer, and news of the Honor 6X’s availability in the United Kingdom.

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