After the recent launch of the Y7 Prime, its latest budget device, Huawei Kenya is set to unveil two other budget smartphones in the market soon.
The two devices, the Huawei Y5 Prime and the Huawei Y6 2018, were quietly announced by the Chinese company last month through listings on its global website, something that is not so uncommon for such devices.
The two devices maintain the 18:9 FullView display found on the Y7 Prime while lowering the amount of available onboard storage and memory to 16GB and 2GB respectively.
Interestingly, it is the Y5 Prime and not the two (Y7 Prime 2018 and Y6 2018), that comes with Android 8.1 onboard. They both lack the dual-camera setup that can be found on the Y7 Prime 2018 and which Huawei has thrown much of its marketing of the device behind.
The Y6 2018 tries to keep much of the aesthetic appeal of the Y7 Prime 2018 as possible. It looks almost similar and it retains some of the features like the AR lens while also emphasizing on others that we last heard about in Samsung’s yesteryear flagship smartphones. Remember Group Play on the Samsung Galaxy S4 five years ago? Something similar is on these budget Huawei smartphones as Group Music.
The Y5 Prime 2018 maintains the three-card slot arrangement (two SIMs, one microSD card slot hence negating the need for a user to choose between adding more storage space or slotting in an additional SIM) that Huawei is touting as one of the key features of the Y7 Prime given the company’s earlier insistence on a hybrid-SIM arrangement.
Both devices keep the face unlock that the Y7 Prime features.
Users can’t have it all, it appears as both devices lack a fingerprint sensor with Huawei preferring to, instead, go with the face unlock, something that Apple did on the upper end of the spectrum when it unveiled the iPhone X last year.
Here are all specifications of the two devices:
| Huawei Y5 Prime 2018 | Huawei Y6 2018 | |
| Dimensions | 146.5 x 70.9 x 8.3mm, 142g | 152.4 x 73 x 7.8mm, 150g |
| Display | 5.45-inch HD+ (1440 x 720 pixels) | 5.7-inch HD+ (1440 x 720 pixels) |
| Camera | Main camera: 13MP Selfie camera: 5MP | Same |
| Processor | MediaTek MT6739 clocked at 1.5GHz | Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 |
| Memory | 2GB RAM, 16GB onboard storage (expandable via microSD) | Same |
| Operating System | Android 8.1, Oreo, with EMUI 8.0 layered on top | Android 8.0, Oreo, with EMUI 8.0 layered on top |
| Battery | 3,020mAh | 3,000mAh |
| Network | 3G, 4G | Same |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, microUSB | Same |
| Others | Dual-SIM | Dual-SIM, NFC (some models, no guarantee that the models that make it to Kenya will have it) |
| Colour options | Blue, Black, Gold | Same |
While it is not yet known at this point what the two devices will cost, it is obvious that they will be way below the Y7 Prime 2018’s Kshs 18,000 pricing. We’ll get to know about that soon.
