Honor 6X is a Huawei Mate 9 lookalike at £225!

Honor, the mid-range phone arm of China’s phone giant Huawei, has released its latest handset, the 6X. Also, follow the @whichtech Twitter feed to send us your comments and questions. The design liked by many is back with refinements. That’s not all they share – the three phones are dust and water resistant with an IP68 rating. It’s like a Huawei Mate 9 in mini form, with a 5.5-inch LCD screen (not the 5.9-inch scale of the Mate 9), which ought to give it wider appeal. A closer look at the phones reveals USB-C charging ports rather than micro USB. And it supports 5V/2A power delivery, meaning fast recharge times.

The design is premium, but what about the internal components?

That said, this is a decent handset at a ridiculously low price and we hope to bring you a full review of the 6X soon.

Of note, Honor emphasizes the screen’s brightness, capable of hitting 450 nits output – that technical figure may not mean much to your average smartphone user, but when you’re outside fighting against the sun for visibility, you need all the brightness you can get. Above the display are the earpiece, proximity sensor, front facing camera and ambient light sensor.

This feature is the same as you’ll find in the Huawei P9 (minus the official Leica partnership and software), meaning a software-based f/0.95 can fake shots into looking all arty and pro. Of course, there will be a 4GB RAM and 64GB storage model available for $50 more if you desire. It allows you to use the Honor 6X as a Wi-Fi extender, so you can connect devices to your Wi-Fi network that may have been previously out of range. The Honor 6X is a “cost-conscious” yet powerful product aimed at giving millennial consumers a device packed with top-of-the-line features that won’t break the bank.

Those with small hands may find the Honor 6X a little hard to hold with its 5.5-inch screen in the middle, but we enjoyed using it. On the back, Honor brought over a dual camera setup first debuted on the Honor 8 previous year, but this time around there’s only one 12MP sensor.

The Honor 5X from early 2016 was one of the best low-end phones you could buy previous year – we even gave it four out of five stars.

This is a pretty smart play by Huawei, which acknowledges that people tend to use the filters and effects found in apps like Instagram and Snapchat more often than those built into the camera.

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.