Honor launches budget phone with a rear-facing display and 6,000mAh battery

Xiaomi has been offering a rear-facing display on its premium phones like the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max, and Honor has now borrowed the idea for a budget model. The company has unveiled the Honor X5ds in South Africa, where the 4GB and 64GB model costs R2,499, or about $150.

The second screen is a 2.01-inch LCD with a 240 x 296 resolution. Owners can use it to frame one-tap selfies with the 50MP rear camera rather than the 5MP front sensor. It also shows call alerts and media playback controls. The X5ds follows the Honor Play 20A, an entry-level model that arrived in August with a small rear screen of its own. Reports also claim the Honor 700 series, expected around November, will carry a rear display, although Honor has not confirmed this.

On the front, the X5ds has a 6.78-inch LCD with a 720 x 1576 resolution, a refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a typical brightness of 600 nits. The 50MP main camera uses an f/1.8 aperture, up to 4x digital zoom, and a single LED flash. Both cameras record video at up to 1080p.

A Unisoc T610 runs the phone, with two Cortex-A75 cores and six Cortex-A55 cores clocked at up to 1.8GHz. Honor pairs it with 4GB of RAM, a further 4GB of virtual memory drawn from storage, and 64GB of internal storage. A dedicated microSD slot in the three-card tray accepts cards of up to 1TB without taking the place of a SIM.

The 6,000mAh battery supports 15W wired charging over USB-C. The X5ds ships with Android 16 Go edition, Google’s lighter version of Android for phones with limited memory, and unlocks with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor. Connectivity covers 4G LTE, dual nano-SIMs, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and GPS, and the phone keeps a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The handset measures 168.3 x 78.5 x 8.72mm and weighs about 214g. An IP52 rating gives it basic protection against dust and light splashes of water. The X5ds comes in colors including Forest Green and Midnight Black in South Africa. Honor has not announced whether the phone will reach other markets.