The flagship Huawei P9 may be the talk of the town with its Leica tinkering and fancy dual-camera set-up, but here comes a new challenger. Huawei’s own sub-brand–honor, has built quite a reputation in delivering affordable but premium-built, high-spec products. The just-launched honor 8 looks fantastic, and continues to blur the lines between Huawei and honor.
Revealed in its native China, the honor 8 steps up in terms of material build and looks. Now sporting metal and glass, it comes in a choice of five colours – Pearl White, Sunrise Gold, Midnight Black, Sakura Pink and Sapphire Blue. Midnight Black and Sapphire Blue especially look stunning, in my opinion.
Design-wise, there’s very iPhone-like lines and 2.5D curves; and you’ll definitely appreciate that there’s no camera bump on the back.
The honor 8 packs a 5.2-inch Full HD display, similar to its predecessor. It gets a HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core chip with up to 4GB RAM, and 32GB or 64GB of onboard storage.
Like the honor 7, it boasts a hybrid dual-SIM tray that takes nano-SIMs and microSD.
The Huawei P9’s Leica-tuned dual-camera set-up has impressed many, and Huawei hasn’t delayed slapping the unique set-up on the lower-rung honor device.
While it lacks Leica’s hand in it, both cameras are also 12MP f/2.2 shooters. Like on the P9, one module captures in RGB, while the other in native black and white. On the front, there’s an 8MP f/2.4 wide-angle selfie camera with large 1.4 micron pixel size.
Beneath the rear cameras is a fast 3D fingerprint scanner that’s not only used to unlock the phone but customizable for different tasks.
On the battery front, the honor 8 is built-in with a 3,000mAh battery with support for fast charging. Honor claims 1.7 days of battery life. It comes with a USB Type-C port, that’s based on USB 2.0 for data transfer.
It ticks all the checkboxes in terms of connectivity–802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, 4G LTE (FDD and TDD, with VoLTE) and infrared blaster.
The honor 8 runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow with EMUI 4.1 on top.
Pricing and availability
The honor 8 will come in several variants, retailing at CNYB1,999/MYR1,186 (3GB RAM + 32GB storage) and CNYB2,299/MYR1,365 (4GB RAM + 32GB storage) respectively. The range-topping 4GB RAM + 64GB storage variant is priced at CNYB2,499/MYR1,483. It will be available in China only starting this month.
Source: Soyacincau, honor China
