Huawei grew from making  23.6 million devices and having 6.3 percent of the market in 2014 to making 32.4 million devices and having 8.1 percent. What is missing is the US market and now it looks like Huawei is waving its Honor 5X as its passport.

The Honor 5X looks like a high quality phone and resembles the design guidelines of HTC One M9. The casing is made of a combination of brushed sand blasted metal, CNC and laser etched technologies.

It has a fingerprint reader at the back that can unlock the phone within 0.5 seconds. You need to touch the sensor only six times to teach it all about your fingerprint. This process was quite painful on iPhone 6 / 6S and most Android phones we tried.The only Huawei that we tested so far was the Kirin 620 based P8 Lite and the phone was quite good for the price.

The Huawei Honor 5X comes has a Snapdragon 616 which is not the latest or greatest SoC but this eight core SOC is still good for a $199 4G LTE phone. This SoC has four 1.7 GHz clocked Cortex A53 and four lower clocked 1GHz Cortex A53 cores powered with an Adreno 405 and Hexagon V50 DSP.

The 5.5 inch screen seems to be popular among many China-based manufactuers and Huawei is not an exception. The Honor 5X comes with a 1920x1080 Full HD IPS screen with a 5.5 inch size and 72.5 percent screen to body ratio.

The phone has 2GB RAM and a 16GB ROM micro SD card up to 128GB. It  measures 151.3 mm x 76.3mm x 8.15mm and weighs 158 g / 5.57 oz.

It comes with a decent 3000 mAh battery and a 13 megapixel rear and 5 megapixel front camera. It is available from today in white, grey or gold, for $199 on Amazon or Newegg.