These days, the best way to get coverage of a new device is to lure tech journalists to an event and try to convey to them how much better your upcoming device is than the competition. If you’re Apple, Google, Microsoft or, say, Samsung — that’s easy. If you’re a company like Huawei, which isn’t as well known among U.S. consumers, it’s a little harder — especially if the phone that you’re announcing is not bleeding edge.
At a relatively modest press event on Tuesday, the Chinese company announced its latest U.S. consumer phone, the unlocked Huawei P8 lite ($250), a lightweight version of the higher-end P8 (which is not being sold in the U.S.). I had a chance to try out the new phone, and found myself with a generally favorable impression.
The P8 lite uses a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor (which was first announced in February, 2014) and 2GB of RAM; it comes with 16GB of storage along with a slot for a microSD card (actually, it has two SIM slots, one of which can also be used for the microSD, offering rather nice flexibility).
