CES 2017: Huawei unveils Honor 6X featuring dual-camera and aluminium chassis for $250

Huawei kicked off CES 2017's smartphone launches by unveiling the Honor 6X. The device costs $250 (£225) and comes with a rear dual-camera module which was popularised by the iPhone 7 range last year.

The handset was first showcased in China last year and is the successor to the low-cost Honor 5X. Honor is Huawei's budget brand, and the Chinese smartphone maker has made a name for itself by manufacturing Android handsets that deliver on quality with affordable price tags.

The Honor 6X follows that legacy and has some impressive hardware specifications like a 5.5-inch 1080p screen with a fast octa-core Kirin 655 SoC which features four A53 cores running at 2.1GHz and four running at 1.7GHz. It has a hefty 3340mAh battery and Huawei claims a full charge will last as much as two days. It comes in two variants of 3GB or 4GB of RAM, with 32GB or 64GB of storage.

The device will be available in gold, silver or grey colour variants and also feature a fingerprint scanner. The dual-camera module at the rear has a 12-megapixel sensor along with a secondary 2-megapixel sensor. The front-facing camera has a single 8-megapixel sensor.

A disappointing feature about the device, however, is its software as Huawei has decided to ship the Honor 6X with the older 4.1 version of the company's EMUI overlay over Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The company promises that an update to Android N and EMUI 5.0 will arrive soon but gave no specific details on when it would hit the device.