There has been considerable speculation about the identity of Huawei’s first smartphone to be powered by an eight-core processor, and now we have the answer, it’s the Honor 3X, also known prior to this as the Glory 3X. Announced at an event in China, the Honor 3X already stands out because of its eight-core processor, but even more so because those eight cores can all run at the same time.
If you’ve been following the progress of eight-core chips fitted inside smartphones, you’ll know that early Samsung Galaxy S4 phones using ARM’s big.LITTLE technology, which essentially nailed two quad-core chips together to make an eight-core processor, never had all the cores working at the same time. This was eventually made possible in an updated version of Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa processor.
However, Huawei isn’t using one of Samsung chips, but MediaTek’s MT6592, which was announced earlier this year. It bypasses the early eight-core configurations to provide the full eight core experience, which it calls True Octa Core. The chip inside the Honor 3X has a clock speed of 1.7GHz, and there’s 2GB of RAM to help it perform at its best.
The new Honor 3X isn’t a small phone either, as it boasts a big 5.5-inch IPS touchscreen, although the resolution is a slightly disappointing 1280 x 720, lower than other top-of-the-range phones with comparably sized screens. A 13-megapixel camera can be found on the rear, and a 5-megapixel camera on the front, plus there is a 3000mAh battery inside the body.
While Huawei has only launched the Honor 3X in China at the moment, it’s apparently set up for use in worldwide 3G networks, so there’s a good chance it’ll be sold internationally in the future. With CES and MWC around the corner, our own version – potentially known as the Glory 3X – could come in the next few months.
