Huawei makes its first real push into the US market with the $249 P8 Lite

Huawei is getting serious about the US market. Like Xiaomi, Oppo and OnePlus, it’s one of several Chinese manufacturers looking to expand their global influence. Huawei taking a bit of an unorthodox approach to it, however.

Rather than selling a spec-driven flagship like the P8 , Huawei’s going after an increasingly competitive midrange market with the P8 Lite,
going on sale today for $249 unlocked. It’s selling on Amazon.com and Huawei.com first, and will hit physical retailers like Best Buy “soon.”
To compete with carrier subsidies, Huawei is providing up to twelve-month financing via Affirm as well.
There’s a slight gold tinge to the metal frame You get a respectable set of innards for the price.

It’s powered by the octa-core Snapdragon 615 clocked at 1.5Ghz, comes loaded with 2GB of RAM and provides 16GB of mercifully expandable storage.

The microSD card slot also doubles as a second SIM card port – both of which are LTE-capable.

Imaging wise – there’s a 13MP shooter on the back a 5MP module on the front. No optical image
stabilization or other fancy hardware, but photos in a dimly lit conference room looked surprisingly
clean; Huawei says that’s thanks to multi-shot noise-reduction.

And of course, there’s a beauty
mode to keep your skin looking smooth (or plasticky).
You’ll be viewing those pictures on a Gorilla Glass 3 panel with a resolution of “only” 1280×720, but
at a relatively small 5-inch screen size (remember when that was considered was huge?), the display
comes in at 293 ppi.

That’s nearly “Retina-class” and in my brief time with the phone, it looked reasonably sharp with well-controlled colors.