Overall Rating
Performance
Features
Price
Pros:Premium design
Powerful processor and performance
Good camera
Powerful processor and performance
Good camera
Cons: No FM
Slippery body
Slippery body
Bottomline: Honor 8 is a well-designed smartphone with a great combination of hardware. Though, in comparison with Oneplus 3, at some places, it wins and sometimes it loses the battle. Some missing features like FM and VoLTE made it not so preferred phone as compared to OnePlus 3 and Asus Zenfone 3. However, if are looking for a phone with good looks and great performance with clean UI and battery then Honor 8 is for you.
Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has launched the Honor 8 a successor of Honor 7. This mid-range smartphone is a direct competitor of OnePlus 3 (Review) and ASUS Zenfone 3 (Review). Honor is promoting it with a special USP i.e Dual camera setup . Let’s see how much worthy is Honor 8 to become your primary phone.
Not so unique yet attractive
Honor 8 has very compact and aesthetic design. The unibody metal design sandwiched between two glasses with the 2.5D curve, adding premium looks. We have seen phones with dual glasses, but its size, plane design along with dual lenses, makes it quite cool. Though it looks cool, but the glasses are prone to fingerprints, also it is quite slippery. Honor 8 is only 153 grams and can easily manageable by one hand thanks to its great dimensions which reminds me previous Honor 5C. At first glance, the smartphone resembles the iPhones, 2.5 D glass on tech front and metallic rims running along the edges .
The notification light is hidden under the speaker grills that can identify only when it glows. The beautiful embossed Honor logo is placed at space below the display. If we talk about the top above side, it used for an infrared emitter whereas at the bottom is for USB Type-C port (USB 2.0 speed) flanked by speaker grills at the right side and 3.5mm audio jack at the left side. Right, side metallic frame comprised by the SIM card slot which is basically a Hybrid tray.
The volume rockers and power on/off are at the right side. They are designed ergonomically with good tactics feedback.
The Dual cameras, laser autofocus sensor, and dual tone flash at the left top back side. The fingerprint sensor is also at the back which can use for multiple tasks such as taking selfies, gesture, locking apps etc.
It sports an LTPS (Low-temperature polycrystalline silicon) 5.2 inches full HD display which looks very sharp. It produces natural and punchy colors with great sharpness. For saving your eyes from stress, there is an option called ‘EYE’. This option will change the color of the display to little bit yellowish to filter the blue light. The viewing angles of the display are also great that allows to watch videos and play games on it without any colour deformation.
Dula lenses to capture every detail
It has a dual 12-megapixel configuration, the one camera captures the color while other is monochrome. The camera packed with a mode called ‘Wide aperture” that can blur the amount of background using a slider. Honor claims that the dual camera setup will improve the picture quality and crispness. The aperture of a camera is f/2.2. We really impressed with the pictures captured by it, images were very crisp, with a good amount of contrast and natural color. The front camera is 8 megapixels that also did an excellent job for us. The low-light selfies were good with very low noise without losing quality but details were a little bit low in the night selfies. It can shoot videos 1080 p video at 60fps but there is no 4K recording. Overall the quality wise the camera is very good but the front camera missed some points and details in the low light.
Various interesting features
The software of Honor 8 is a customized OS called Emotion UI or EMUI v 4.1 based on Android v6.0 Marshmallow. The EMUI is a single layered interface with lots of customization and improvements such as notification bar, setting shortcuts, icons, shortcuts at the lock screen, and much more.
Honor 8 also packs with some gesture controls along with ‘Smart assistance’ which is basically a voice control. One really interesting gesture of Honor 8 is Knuckle sense. This gesture will allow taking screenshot or screen recording using knuckles. It comes with lots of pre-installed apps such as a smart controller which is a basic app to control the IR devices using IR blaster.
Knuckle features for capturing screenshot and screen recording.
Runs smoothly
Under the hood, the Honor 8 packed with HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core which has equivalent performance to Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. For multitasking, it has 4 GB RAM and 32 GB for storage that can expandable up to 128 GB using Hybrid SIM card slot. For connectivity, it gives dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, USB OTG, NFC and 4G LTE . VoLTE is yet not available in Honor 8 but the company claims it will enable in future using software update.
We used this phone for multitasking and high graphics games like Asphalt Air born and Mortal Kombat X both works perfectly without lag. There is no heating issue but sometimes we faced a little bit heating while using the camera. The call quality and usage of 4G on this phone was also fine without any glitches. Also, the media playback on this was pretty smooth, it plays the 4 K video smoothly and the speaker with DTS support gives decent output.
Both side glass no doubt gives a premium finish to the phone but it also makes it slippery. While using this phone, it slipped from our hand many times, it falls approximately from 5 feet, but this accidently drops handles by honor 8 easily without any damage. Yes, while this drop we got a little scratch on the display this means it is not scratch proof.
Great battery
Honor 8 use a 3000mAh battery to power its hardware. It supports fast charging feature and able to charge about 45% in just half hour using its own charger. On one single charge and with normal usage we able to extract a juice of one and a half from honor 8. In our video loop test at full brightness and volume, we got 7 hours and 4 minutes of runtime.
Honor 8 Review Synopsis
Honor 8 is a well-designed smartphone with a great combination of hardware. Though, in comparison with Oneplus 3, at some places, it wins and sometimes it loses the battle. Some missing features like FM and VoLTE made it not so preferred phone as compared to OnePlus 3 and Asus Zenfone 3. However, if are looking for a phone with good looks and great performance with clean UI and battery then Honor 8 is for you.
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