If you can’t buy the Huawei P8 Lite 2017, the Honor 8 Lite is nearly identical

Whether it intends to launch it on a wider scale at Mobile World Congress remains to be seen, but for now, Honor has made the Honor 8 Lite official in Finland, following rumors of the device’s existence spread over the past weeks. The addition of the word Lite to the name should give you a clue about the differences between it and the full Honor 8 phone. That’s right, this is a midlevel device, and doesn’t have the Honor 8’s cool dual-lens rear camera.

The Honor 8 Lite is up for pre-order in Finland through retailer Expert, with a delivery date of February 17 attached, and a price of 270 euros. That’s about $292 at current exchange rates. It joins a post on Instagram by Huawei Finland (Huawei is Honor’s technical partner and parent company) showing the phone, and saying pre-orders have already begun.

All this activity means we now have a complete picture of the Honor 8 Lite, and a full specification list, and it’ll look very familiar to Huawei phone fans. Why? It appears to be almost identical to the Huawei P8 Lite 2017, right down the the design and the processor.

The Honor 8 Lite’s screen measures 5.2-inches and has a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, and a sheet of 2.5D curved glass over the top, giving the phone a modern stylish look. Inside is a Kirin 655 octa-core processor with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of memory space, plus a MicroSD card slot. There’s a fingerprint sensor on the back, and a 3,000mAh battery to keep everything going.

Like the P8 Lite 2017, it’s a single 12-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel selfie cam above the screen on the front. The change to the rear camera represents the biggest alteration over the Honor 8. The good news is the Honor 8 Lite has Android 7.0 Nougat installed, along with Huawei’s much improved EMUI 5.0 user interface over the top. A white version is for sale through the Finnish retailer, and a black model is pictured on Huawei’s Instagram post, but rumors suggest a gold and a blue version will also be sold.

It’s questionable whether Honor will sell the Honor 8 Lite where the Huawei P8 Lite 2017 is already sold. For example, the P8 Lite 2017 has been announced in the United Kingdom, and we’d be surprised to see the Honor 8 Lite on sale there, too. Honor has seen success with the Honor 8 in the U.S. though, and it may be the Lite version will join it in the range soon. We’ll keep you updated.

Article originally published 02-01-2017 by Williams Pelegrin. Updated on 02-02-2017 by Andy Boxall: Rewritten after official launch of the Honor 8 Lite in Finland