We recently wrote a lengthy hands-on article about the Huawei Honor 5X smartphone, a handset whose performance, features and apparent quality surprised me, given the $200 price tag. The phone has been available for preorder for a while, but it's officially on sale now.
You can get yourself an Honor 5X directly from the brand website, or from Amazon or Newegg. Available colors are gold, silver, and gray.
It appears that you can't get an Honor 5X from your carrier (at least not in the U.S.), but at $200, who cares? Subsidies have pretty much evaporated anyway, and if you aren't interested in financing your phone, you'll want something that has a reasonable price tag -- like the Honor 5X.
Huawei's push into North America (which includes the higher-end Huawei Mate 8) begins in earnest now.
Update, 2/2/16, 8:25am PT: We reached out to Huawei to confirm a detail on carrier support. A company representative told Tom's Hardware the following: "Honor 5X works on T-Mobile, along with any U.S. GSM/LTE carrier. Honor 5x also supports Band 12, but the experience will vary from carrier to carrier."
I beleive it supports LTE bands 2/4/6/7/12/17. You can see the specs on their website here: http://www.hihonor.com/us/products/mobile-phones/honor5x/parameters/
Some of the reviewers online appear to say that band 12 is missing, but the specs on the hihonor website say differently.
Although it has the Band 12 antenna, TMobile doesn't allow it's use on their network unless the phone supports VoLTE. I'm wondering if that will be added later(maybe it's there now and I don't know) like the Nexus 5x and 6P.
