An octa-core processor, 4gigs of RAM… there was a time when such kind of hardware would only be available in smartphones costing upwards Rs 50,000. Not anymore however. Chinese smartphone makers have been instrumental in bringing this change, and Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has lead the charge from the front. Its latest smartphone, the Honor 8, is no different as it offers flagship specifications at an attractive price of Rs 29,999.
In fact, the Honor 8 easily defies its price with some of the features which aren’t even available in phones that are available twice its price. It comes in a stylish combo of glass and metal, which looks simply stunning. It’s also optimium for one-hand use as it’s fitted with a compact display of 5.2-inches offering a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. The USP of the Honor 8 is its dual-camera arrangement at the back, which is made up of two 12MP sensors. At the front, it gets a 8MP camera for selfies. For software, the mobile has company’s custom skin dubbed as Emotion UI, which runs on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The phone sips the power from a 3,000mAh battery. Of course, the Honor 8 is loaded on all the other aspects – a multi-purpose fingerprint scanner, 4G, dual-SIM support, and more.
However, the major concern that most people have is whether the phone they are purchasring is powerful enough for their needs or not. The spec sheet of the Honor 8 certainly suggests so as it’s powered by the Kirin 950 SoC. The chipset is built in-house by Huawei’s subsidiary called HiSilicon, and is based on a 16nm architecture. The processor balances performance and power-efficiency quite well, as it has four powerful cores tuned at 2.3GHz, while the other low-power cores are clocked at 1.8GHz. It’s coupled with 4GB of RAM and Mali-T880 MP4 GPU.
But specs don’t tell everything, and that’s why we decided to run the Honor 8 through a set of benchmarks to gauge its performance.
The first test we ran on the Honor 8 is AnTuTu, which of course is among the most popular benchmarking apps out there. The phone scored 92,367, which is nothing short of impressive.
Love playing games? Well, the Honor 8 has got you covered there as well, which can be seen from its score on Nenamark 2. The handset got 59.3fps in the app, which suggests that the graphics while playing heavy games would be buttery smooth.
We also ran the Gfxbench app which pushes the graphical limits of the phones, and the Honor 8 aced it. For the car chase video running at 1080p, it was able to offer a frame rate of 338.5fps.
AnTuTu gives a score of overall capabilities of the phone, so now it’s time to check out Honor 8’s processing prowess. Company’s homegrown Kirin 950 is surely quite powerful as the phone scored 1,653 in the single-core test of GeekBench 3. The octa-core performance can also be known from the fact the phone got 4,661 in the multi-core test.
With web browsing being one of the most frequent activities on mobile devices, we also used Vellamo to judge the abilities of the Honor 8. With a score of 5,222, it’s certainly ranks similar to most high-end offerings.
If you don’t believe entirely on benchmarks, then you’d be glad to know that the Honor 8 keeps up with day-to-day tasks as well. There were no lags while navigating between screens, opening different apps, or even playing games. The phone handled powerful titles such as Asphalt 8 like a charm.
So, there you have it. The Honor 8 isn’t just a one-trick pony with its dual cameras. It’s also a powerful smartphone that doesn’t cost a bomb.
Disclaimer: this is a sponsored post
