Huawei started the dual camera smartphone with P9, same technology is inherited to its Honor 8. It is made to fill gaps who can’t go for P9 but still wants a good camera smartphone. Honor 8 is not an ordinary piece of smartphone but it is a jewel in the style statement. The best part of the device is – it is not big in size (5.2-inch) also has 2.5D curved glass in front and rear for giving a premium look.
Honor 8 camera is ofcourse the big highlight of the smartphone as they are dual 12MP in the rear. It gives you flawless DOF (depth of field) and bokeh effects. The front is 8MP which takes good selfies and screen flash is an added advantage for low light selfies.
Design and Build
We have already done the unboxing of Honor 8, the box contains – Rapid charger (9V/2A), Earphones, a Type C cable. Honor 8 looks a lot like P9 but it is one of its kind. It has a metal frame, Shining body coz of 2.5D curved glass which is eye catching. The rear part has the fingerprint sensor which is 360 degree functional and it is Smart Key which has three actions on single press, double press, and long press. It can be used as voice recording, toggling the flashlight, taking a screenshot or launching an app.
Honor 8 has buttons with tactile feedback, notification LED is smartly placed on earpiece grill. On the top it has IR Blaster and bottom comes with 3.5mm jack (they didn’t remove the port to make the smartphone thin), a USB Type-C port on the bottom. The smartphone has Single nano SIM support and expandable memory upto 128GB (it has ejectable single tray).
Hardware and Software
Honor 8 comes with a powerful processor Kirin 950 octa-core, which can do multi tasking very easily. The benchmark scores we get with Honor 8 are – AnTuTu score 89545,GFXbench (which is a good score to win against Snapdragon 820 in real time usage). The smartphone is coupled with 4GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, USB OTG, and NFC. VoLTE is currently not supported with the smartphone but it is a software which can be roll out soon by Over The Air (OTA).
The smartphone is running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Emotion UI (v4.1) or EMUI on top. It comes with features like Now-on-Tap, One hand UI, Voice control, Mirror Share, Voice broadcast etc. Even the fingerprint sensor has multiple usage other than smart key like to take photos, answer call, stop alarm, browse pictures. The voice control for calling works smooth.
It has Link+ in the network which was present in P9, this fiction enhances the signal reception, lets quick connectivity with network while roaming, and Wi-Fi+ (it automatically switches between Wi-Fi and mobile data). We have tried this on remote areas where network is poor or weak, it still manages to get better connectivity than other smartphones.
The best part is it doesn’t have bloatware, it has very optimum apps like Google apps, Smart controller, Phone manager. The Smart controller lets you smartphone to change as Universal Remote through the IR blaster. It comes with new gesture feature called Knuckle Sense, that helps to take screenshot or start a screen recording by drawing a circle or knocking the screen with your knuckles. It has Floating Dock for shortcuts to common actions. It also has ROG power saving which changes Full HD video to HD for battery saving purpose.
Camera app and Samples
The dual cameras of Honor 8 is the highlight part of device. the dual camera setup is individual 12-megapixel colour and monochrome sensors. As far the aperture is concern it has f/2.2. The camera app is similar Huawei P9. The sensors can produce good detailed macros, can also adjust the amount of background blur using a slider near the focus reticule. In Low Light the camera gets small volume of noise but still manages to capture to images.
The front camera is an important feature for taking selfies, hence Honor 8 has 8MP front camera with f/2.4 aperture. It has a front screen flash that takes good image in minimum lighting conditions. Few good options in the camera app is the document scan which detects the border of document and crops it automatically. Light Painting is another good feature to click Long exposure shots very easily. It lets the user to keep the RAW images too, which helps for pro editing.
Performance and Battery
The Honor 8 manages multitasking easily as it has the processor is beast. It can play high Graphics game like NOVA 3, Mortal Combat, Asphalt 8 without any lag. We didn’t find the smartphone to be heating up. It has a good and vibrant display and support 4K video playback. It has DTS audio support in the earphones. The audio of Honor 8 is decent and speakers are enough to cheer you up while playing music.
The Honor 8 has a non-removable 3000mAh battery with supports fast charging. In box charger gives 45% battery charge only in 30 minutes. In normal usage it can run for a day, where as heavy user can manage to get 9-10 hours of decent battery life. The ROG mode helps to down 720p resolution and keep your battery to last a bit longer.
Gizmo Verdict
Honor 8 is really a good flagship smartphone – which not only gives good camera, in addition with stylish elegant design and a powerful processor to do multitasking easily. The Sapphire Blue was the colour we got for review and it looks like a style statement for sure. The price of Rs. 29,999 is a good offer to consumer as it also get competition with Asus Zenfone 3 and OnePlus 3.
