Huawei’s latest flagship offering Honor 8 is available in China since a long time and is now available in India. This new offering targets the young audience with its attractive design, excellent camera in decent price. The company is now looking further to build up their brand Honor with this new Honor 8 release in India. Here we provide you Honor 8 review which provides you the good, the bad about this affordable flagship offering from Huawei.
Huwaei Honor 8 Review
Design and Build quality:
Honor 8 resembles its previous flagship Huawei P9 in looks and is quite a bit thicker and heavier that it. The thin bezels around the phone’s display give a premium smartphone look. The rear of the device is built from 15 layers of glass which the company says 3D grating and lithography.
The combo of aluminum and glass provides Honor 8 a high-quality feel when compared to many devices in its price segment. It gives a great in-hand experience similar to Samsung Galaxy S7 be it front or back. A less strong display protection is featured on the front with Gorilla Glass 3. This hints the phone may suffer scratches if you are not a particular user.
The positioning of the buttons are good, and the volume rocker keys are within easy reach. The fingerprint sensor is very responsive and also found placed well just at a scope of a forefinger. The capacitive navigation buttons are adjusted at the bottom of the display.
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Other connections like 3.5 mm jack and USB Type-C port are located on the bottom just beside the mono speaker. An IR blaster is also catered to the phone to have remote access to television, home stereo, and other household appliances.
Display:
Honor 8 features a 5.2 inch screen, with a Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 and the 423ppi is sharp enough. The display manages to convince the touch precision, image quality, contrast, and brightness. The display is good at its job and is easy to read even from bad angles. It remains clear even in Sunlight with never retreating colors.
Many software features are also added to improve readability further. The color temperature can be changed, and blue-light emission can be decreased to reduce eye-strain.
Performance:
Honor 8 Sports Huawei’s octa-core Kirin 950 processor with i5 co-processor. The processor couples with 4GB RAM ensures a lag-free performance and found no slowdown. Apps were found quick to open and pages load faster. Honour 8 turned to be a mixed bag as it could perform only at the level of Huawei P9 with its specifications.
The smartphone is equipped with Mali-T880 MP4 GPU which performs well at gaming. It may not be future proof, and high-end Adreno GPU is the reason. However, gaming performance may not beat other flagships like Samsung Galaxy S7. On 3Dmark test, Honor 8 with the Mali-T880 MP4 scored a 964.
Hardware:
Honor 8 is fast with decent performance and comes with a low price tag. The antennas switch quickly between transmission towers for mobile internet assuring quick and stable internet connection. The handset is fast in image processing, surfing the web, and is faster in all aspect when compared to many expensive devices in the market.
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The Kirin 950 octa-core processor from the Huawei-owned HiSilicon brand is credited for its performance. The device is made of four Cortex-A72 CPUs which clocks at 2.3 GHz and four Cortex-A53 CPUs clocks at 1.8 GHz with Mali-T880 MP4 graphics unit. 4 gigs of RAM ensure a hassle-free switching between apps and a faster internal memory booting speed.
The Dual SIM mobile provides an option to extend memory up to 128GB at the cost of on SIM slot. A headphone jack is located on the left side of the USB Type-C charging slot and a single speaker on the right. The speaker performance is decent in serving the purpose but not to expect extreme audio without any noise.
Software:
Honor 8 runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Huawei’s Emotion UI 4.1 on the top. On software font, it’s very different from stock Android, and there is no app drawer. iOS like UI has a high number of additions, while some users enjoy the new experience and some may not like it.
These new additions from Huawei are only appreciated up to an extent, but many of them come across gimmicky. Coming to EMUI, it also has an entirely different smoother mechanic. It looks nice but may fail in satisfying users in day-to-day use.
Camera:
Honor 8 houses a 12 MP dual-camera configuration with a f/2.2 aperture and laser assisted hybrid autofocus. One of the lenses is assigned for capturing color, and the other is monochrome. Huawei claims this setup will help the phone to capture better and crisper looking images.
The device takes great images with excellent dynamic range and a good amount of sharpness. Overall it’s a great shooter, and the images it takes are sp pleasing. Another 8 MP front shooter is also good at its range.
Surprisingly, low-light performance is high unlike many other smartphones. Images may not be excellent, but they are quite acceptable considering the price range.
Having a dual camera setup is an advantage with full aperture mode which allows setting an aperture from f/0.95 to f/16 when clicking a photo. You can change the aperture or focus point once after taking a picture.
Coming to video recording, 4K video recording option is found missing, and you’re limited to 1080P/60p. But it’s quite good at the quality of video what the sensor captures.
Battery Life:
Honor 8 provides three battery profiles out of the box: Smart, performance, and ultra. The quick default mode does improve the battery life marginally and prevents many app notifications. This may also lead you to miss few important messages.
The 3000mAh battery delivers disappointing results, and only stands for a day in light to moderate use. If you are a heavy user, charging your phone twice a day is a must. The battery will be the only drawback aspect for the phone which the competitors in the segment are high at.
Provided fast charging option recharges the battery up to 100% less than an hour.
Conclusion:
Honor 8 is an affordable flagship offering from Huawei with a gorgeous design and great camera. IR blaster is to be considered which is not common in this price range.
