The Honor 5C — a new budget-centric option from Huawei's Honor brand — landed in China last month, bringing surprisingly decent hardware specs at a staggeringly low price point. The Chinese version of the phone packs Huawei's homemade octa-core Kirin 650 chip, 2 or 3 gigabytes of RAM, a 5.2-inch 1080p display, fingerprint security and a 13-megapixel main camera, backed up by an 8-megapixel selfie shooter. The price? 899 yuan — that's around £100, or US$140. And it looks like Honor is poised to launch this highly affordable, potentially really good phone in Europe and India.

Category Specification Operating System Android 6.0, EMUI 4.1 CPU Hisilicon Kirin 650 (4x ARM Cortex-A53 @ 2GHz + 4x ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1.7GHz), 16nm process GPU Mali T830 MP2 RAM 2-3GB depending on SKU Display 5.2-inch 1080p LCD, 423 ppi Internal storage 16GB/32GB; 16GB model has 10GB available microSD Up to 128GB supported Main camera 13MP, f/2.0, LED flash Front camera 8MP, f/2.0 Cellular 4G LTE Cat. 6 Wifi 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n Battery 3,000mAh non-removable Fingerprint security 0.5s unlock time

By any measure, that's a lot of smartphone for not a whole lot of money. And a few things stand out to us that could give it an edge over rivals in the entry-level market — as well as addressing pain points from previous Honor phones.

The Honor 5C could address some of our biggest pain points from the 5X.