Despite being one of its most successful budget smartphone lineups in the world, Huawei hasn’t made it a priority to avail its Nova devices in the country.
For the most, our idea of budget devices from Huawei has been those in its Y series, the latest being the Huawei Y9s it launched late last year just as the Huawei Nova 5T was going on sale in several other markets around the world, months after its August announcement.
According to a statement sent by the company’s local office early last week, Huawei is expected to make the Nova 5T available in the local market soon. Our money is on the device showing up this week, at least going by what we’ve heard from our sources.
The Huawei Nova 5T is a variation of another device offered by Huawei’s sub-brand Honor. Since Honor devices are not available locally, at least on an official basis, the Nova 5T will make up for the Honor 20’s absence.
Borrowing from Huawei’s established trend of packing notable optics on its budget devices, the Nova 5T packs 4 cameras at the back: a 48-megapixels high-resolution shooter backed by a 16-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, a 2-megapixel bokeh lens and another 2-megapixel lens for macro shots.
It also keeps the premium look and feel of recent budget devices from the company that have their way to the local market like the P30 Lite (both standard and “new” edition) and those that dominate the upper echelons of the Y series with glass on the front and back sandwiching an aluminium frame.
Its cling to fame, however, will be the fact that it will become the first Huawei smartphone in Kenya with a punch-hole display, following Samsung’s lead with similar devices in the Galaxy A series, for which it will be competing against.
The punch-hole is to accommodate the 32-megapixel selfie camera.
Other features that give it a leg up include the choice of chipset that Huawei has opted to go with (the same Kirin 980 processor that can be found on the flagship P30 Pro) and the famed Huawei SuperCharge which, by using the 22.5W charger included with the device, users are assured of juicing up the device to at least the halfway mark in just half an hour.
There is also a departure from Huawei’s adherence to putting the fingerprint sensor either on the front, as it has done in the past on certain devices, under the display or on the back. On the Nova 5T, the fingerprint reader resides on the power button, something we have also seen on devices from Samsung, Nokia and others for a long while now.
According to Huawei, the Nova smartphone series has been a tremendous success. As we noted in our newsletter back in 2018, by mid that year alone, the lineup had seen over 50 million of its units shipped by Huawei around the world. The number, according to the statement we received last week from the company, grew to 65 million units by the end of that year. By now, it is doing nine figures.
How much do you think the Huawei Nova 5T will be going for?
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