Huawei’s sub-brand Honor is targeted at brave and young consumers. Within just a couple of years of its launch in India, the company has already introduced some beautiful smartphones with some amazing features. This time, it has launched the Honor 8 Lite, which inherits the look and design inherited from its elder brother, the Honor 8. Sadly, it doesn’t come with the dual-lens setup at the back, but for its price, it does manage to offer a lot. Let’s see whether the Honor 8 Lite is worth buying or not.
Design and build
The Honor 8 Lite weighs 147 grams and has a thickness of 7.6mm. It resembles the look of the Honor 8, which came last year. It doesn’t have the dual-camera setup, but it continues with the glass body on both sides, giving it a premium look. At the front, it has thin bezels. The front camera is placed above the display, with a bunch of sensors.
On the right edge, volume rocker and the power button is placed, while the left side has a hybrid SIM slot. At the bottom, speaker grills are positioned with the micro-USB slot in the middle, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top.
At the back, the Honor 8 Lite has a primary camera along with LED Flash on the left side. It has the fingerprint sensor positioned below. The fingerprint reader can also perform some more functions like picking up calls, clicking photos, swiping left or right to scroll photos, apart from unlocking the device. The glossy finish at the back looks premium, but fingerprints and smudges are common. Thankfully, a hardcover comes inside the box to protect the back of the smartphone.
Hardware and Software
When it comes to the specs the smartphone has some decent specs like 5.2-inch Full HD 2.5D curved Glass display with 1920×1080 pixels. It is powered by octa-core (4 x 2.1GHz + 4 x 1.7GHz) HiSilicon Kirin 655 processor with ARM Mali-T830 MP2 GPU. The Honor 8 Lite has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage which can be expandable up to 128GB via microSD. It packs with 3000mAh non-removable battery and supports dual SIM. It has connectivity options 4G VoLTE, Wifi-802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.1 and a microUSB port.
Honor 8 Lite runs on Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.0 on top. These is pretty much same like the earlier version of EMUI but comes with a few new features. The most important one is the Eye Comfort mode which gives a Yellowish tint to the display, which ensures there’s no eye-strain while reading in the dark. The UI provides the App drawer feature with battery optimisations, security features, smart services and a lot more. It also comes with SOS emergency calling feature which is present in all Honor smartphones. There’s also HiBoard and universal search bar. The smooth UI provides more fluidity and better user experience.
Camera
The rear camera comes with 12MP with LED Flash, f/2.2 aperture, 1.25 um Pixel size sensor and the front camera is 8MP with 77-degree wide angle lens, f/2.0 aperture. The camera UI is simple to use and the interface of Honor camera has not changed with EMUI upgrade. Swiping on the left will give all the modes including Pro Photos, Video, Pro Video, HDR, light painting, night and many more. The camera performance of the Honor 8 Lite is good and the result in daylight is detailed, and colours are vibrant. While using the HDR mode, shutter speed is fast and there is not lag. If we go for macro shots focus is an issue for it. Talking about the low light conditions it impresses with the image output, although there are some grains. The front camera is good enough to take selfies.
Battery and Performance
The Honor 8 Lite juiced up with 3000mAh battery. Though it doesn’t come with fast charging, it can deliver a whole day backup on a single charge on 4G. This is because of the excellent battery optimisation feature backed into the UI. As far as games are concerned, Kirin 655 is pretty powerful processor and when coupled with 4GB RAM, it can handle the heavy games like Asphalt 8, Modern Combat and others with ease.
Gizmo-Verdict
The attractive features of Honor 8 Lite are Design, its updated UI, decent camera, one-day battery. Making it even more interesting is its availability through offline channels. The compelling price of Rs. 17,999 and offline sale will definitely attract Indians as many users still believe to see the phone and hold it before purchase. While it faces a tough competition, we believe it can compete well with the likes of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Moto G5 Plus, and Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime.
