Review of Honor 8 Pro – almost a flagship at an adequate price

The global market for mobile phones and smartphones is constantly updated with new developments offered by well-known companies. There is practically no place for newcomers in this industry, however, Huawei, which appeared on the market not so long ago, is actively trying to take its place in the sun. To increase its market share, the company is constantly improving the design of its products, developing original cases for gadgets and improving the performance of smartphones.

The Honor brand is another way for Huawei to gain more space in the mobile device market, and it has proven to be quite effective. Just look at the new Honor 8 Pro smartphone, which we will review now. Those who have already taken a closer look at the device have not for nothing called it a real iPhone, only with a larger screen and a range of capabilities. This comparison is due to a number of changes that affected the new Honor model. This includes increasing the size and resolution of the screen, installing a top-end processor, using the latest version of Android, and much more. But first things first.

Specifications

Let's take a closer look at this original Huawei Honor device. We provide an overview of its technical characteristics in the table.

If you compare the technical characteristics of the processor of the Samsung galaxy s8 exynos phone and the processor of the Huawei Honor 8 Pro, you can see that they are almost identical, and the question arises: why are many people willing to overpay for the Samsung name, receiving the same device parameters that the Huawei developer offers, but much cheaper?

It is also worth noting that the Huawei device perfectly supports memory cards of various sizes, so the memory capacity can be increased significantly. Honor 8 Pro, compared to other Huawei smartphones, can simply be called a revolutionary breakthrough in the improvement of smartphones. Thanks to a modern processor, the device works quickly. There are no problems with a lack of memory: the card has backup capabilities. Honor 8 Pro has a modern GPS and A-GPS navigator, connects perfectly to a wireless network, and BeiDou is also installed.

⇡#Communications and wireless communications

Honor 8 Pro exists only in a dual-SIM version - nano-SIM cards are used. I have already said about the need to choose between a memory card and a SIM card. It should also be said that there is one radio module - the Dual Standby mode is activated, in which when a call arrives on one of the cards, the second one is turned off.

Honor 8 Pro, slot for two nano-SIM or
nano-SIM and microSD
A complete set of wireless modules. Moreover, to the usual NFC, Bluetooth 4.2 LE and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n/ac (although both NFC and dual-band Wi-Fi for Huawei devices were exotic until recently) an infrared port has been added, through which you can “steer” various home electronics when installing special applications. Many blame its absence in the same Samsung Galaxy S8 as a serious drawback of this smartphone. The claim, in my opinion, is dubious, but why not once again be glad that someone does not neglect the infrared sensor. LTE Category 6 is supported with a theoretical receive data rate of up to 300 Mbps. All bands necessary for normal operation of 4G networks in Russia are available.

The navigation module works with GPS (with A-GPS support), GLONASS, BeiDou. The smartphone is quite suitable for the role of a navigator - it finds satellites at an average speed: if the initial connection takes 5-7 seconds, then full contact with 20-24 satellites and the location of the Honor 8 Pro refined to 8 meters takes about a minute.

Equipment

Modern devices have approximately the same configuration. Both apple iPhone x, Huawei Honor 8 Pro, and other models are packaged in an original box with the manufacturer’s logo. When purchasing Honor 8, the kit will include a device for charging the phone, as well as a C-type USB cable. This model is adapted for fast charging, so in the box the buyer will find a special 18-watt adapter, which has much in common with the Super charger P10 power adapter.

The small compartment of the box, which is usually used for SIM cards or various documents, contains 2 special lenses. This is a feature of this smartphone, so the buyer cannot immediately figure out why they are needed. At the very bottom of the package you can find special VR glasses made of cardboard. Assembling this set is not that difficult, but if you have any questions, you can always refer to the instructions that came with the device.

The standard equipment of Huawei Honor 8 Pro includes:

• Huawei Honor 8 Pro device;
• A special tool that removes the SIM card;
• Instructions for use of the device;
• Warranty coupon;
• Charging for Honor 8 Pro 5V/2A:1.

Design

Despite the fact that Chinese Huawei phones have released more than one model, it is still too early to talk about any special, exclusive design of smartphones. One could even say that the models were veiled copies of Samsung or iPhone, but Huawei experts explained this by the practicality and convenience of competitors’ designs, as well as the lack of a similar budget to create an alternative, radically new style for their phones.

Nevertheless, the Chinese manufacturer is actively looking for individual appearance characteristics for its gadgets, although it cannot be said that Huawei has problems with the number of sales. For example, Huawei Honor 8 has a very interesting iridescent glass, but for some reason this design element did not transfer to Honor 8 Pro. Honor 8 Pro is again compared to the iPhone: the presence of a metal body, rounded edges and other familiar details are reminiscent of the latest iPhone models.

Although Huawei devices have even more unconventional designs, just look at the unusual blue color of the device. It attracts attention and looks very original. You have a choice in the color of your smartphone, because Huawei Honor 8 Pro is also available in black and gold. If we talk about the ergonomics of the device, then here it is in many ways superior to the so popular iPhone. Honor 8 Pro has 2.5D glass on the outside, and metal was used to create the back and side panels.

However, the new Huawei model has its drawbacks, one of which is the typical problem of all smartphones with a matte back panel - it gets dirty very quickly. The gadget is constantly in the user's hands, and fingerprints gradually cover the entire panel. Yes, they may not stand out much, but getting rid of marks on a matte finish is not so easy. As for the oleophobic glass coating, it in Honor 8 Pro is superior in quality to that used for the P10 and P10+.

The design of the body edges was created based on a compromise solution. They cannot be called round, because neat metal fractures are noticeable on the side parts, but at the same time, there are no sharp corners here either. All the buttons are located on the right side of the phone, while only the SIM card slot is located on the left side. On the top panel of the gadget there is a microphone with a noise reduction system. There was also a place for an infrared transmitter. The fingerprint sensor is round in shape. It can be found on the back of the phone.

Display

The display of this model is different from the Honor 8 screen: its resolution is much better. If the 8 has 1080 pixels, then the 8 PRO has 1440x2560. Clearer, brighter images are certainly a good thing, but you also have to take into account the fact that the higher the screen resolution, the more battery is consumed, so the battery on this phone will drain a little faster than on its predecessor.

As for the brightness indicators, here the manufacturers have outdone themselves; the 560 Nits mark is truly impressive. The Huawei Honor 8 Pro handles blacks very well, and this gives very good contrast in images, as well as excellent visibility in the sun. If we talk about color reproduction, its performance is also on par, so the Honor 8 smartphone is a worthy competitor to devices from well-known brands.

Compared to iPhone 7 Plus, Samsung and other smartphones, Huawei Honor 8 Pro has a higher maximum brightness, and in order to make the screen tones less cool, you just need to set the parameters manually. We present the main indicators of the Honor 8 Pro display in the table.

Sound

Despite the fact that the Honor 8 Pro mobile device has a lot in common with the Huawei Mate 9, it still does not have two speakers. The characteristics of Honor 8 Pro indicate that the device has only one speaker, which the manufacturers placed at the bottom of the smartphone. It cannot be said that this greatly affects the sound quality: the sound is clear, loud, you can listen to music, but on Huawei Mate 9 the sound transmission is still better than here. However, it is worth noting that a number of modern phones have much lower sound quality and lower volume.

You can listen to music on Honor 8 Pro using your own player, which has a convenient, simple and quite attractive interface. There are no additional manual settings; the virtual DTS system is either turned off completely or turned on the same way. The phone has a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The Honor 8 Pro phone has a voice recorder that is characterized by excellent sensitivity and creates a recording of very good quality. The gadget does not have an FM radio, but now there are many applications that can replace the built-in program.

Communication and sound

The Honor 8 Pro's cellular signal reception is reliable, as is the case with all premium smartphones based on the Kirin 960 chipset. The same applies to voice transmission during conversations. I will not stop repeating that Huawei is doing great in this regard.

The metal case does not interfere with reliable signal reception. Plastic antennas a la iPhone work flawlessly.

In addition to the main camera, Honor 8 Pro also saved on sound. There are no stereo speakers like in the Mate 9 or P10 Plus, and the only speaker on the bottom is not of high quality. It's loud, but nothing more.

The sound quality in the headphones is exactly the same as in other Huawei smartphones based on the Kirin 960. The sound is average, there is no DAC or built-in amplifier, which means you shouldn’t count on the phone to drive Hi-Fi headphones. Sound quality is comparable to Snapdragon 821/820 devices, although Xperia flagships sound better due to software improvements.

Cameras

Using the Honor 8 Pro, photos are taken on par with digital cameras. This is due to the fact that Huawei has long been paying great attention to improving not only the main camera. The mechanism itself for creating a camera in the 8 Pro model is the same as in the simple Eight and in the Huawei P9. The phone has two camera sensors measuring 1/2.9 inches. One sensor concentrates on black and white, and the second on color, and therefore has increased sensitivity. But the lenses of the 12 MP camera are the same, having an aperture of F/2.4.

Almost all Chinese smartphones combine data from both sensors using special algorithms when using the camera. This affects the quality of photographs: the clarity and contrast of the image increases. Therefore, in general, the result is better than when using a universal twelve-pixel photosensor. In addition, in 8 PRO, manufacturers added the ability to use a monochrome mode, which was absent in the previous eight.

There is no autofocus in Huawei Honor 8 Pro, but the dual camera perfectly simulates deep sharpness and has a good color gamut. This allows you to create the effect of blurring the background and emphasizing the main subject or, conversely, focusing on those details that are located away from the camera. A big plus is that the focus point can be selected after the photo has been taken. This allows you to create the impression that the image was created by a real professional.

Camera. Saved

The main camera of the Honor 8 Pro is the only thing on which Huawei allowed themselves to seriously save money. It uses the first generation of dual cameras, which are installed in Huawei P9, P9 Plus and Honor 8.

The dual camera of Honor 8 Pro is based on two 12 megapixel sensors (Sony IMX286): one RGB and the other monochrome. Physical size 1/2.9″, pixel size 1.25 microns, aperture F/2.2.

The main differences over Huawei's flagships are the lack of mention of Leica and a more simplified version of the camera app. Because of this, manual mode is implemented differently, not as gracefully as in Huawei flagship cameras.

Also, you cannot find film simulation in the Honor 8 Pro camera settings. The remaining capabilities of the Honor 8 Pro camera are in place: manual mode, HDR, slow motion, time lapse, panorama, etc.

I did not notice any differences in the shooting quality of the Honor 8 Pro compared to the Honor 8. The camera is not bad, but is inferior to Huawei smartphones with the second generation of dual Leica cameras - Mate 9, P10 and P10 Plus.

The Honor 8 Pro camera is not flagship level, but it allows you to get the desired result.

Comparison of Huawei Mate 9 and Honor 8 Pro cameras:

Comparison of Honor 8 Pro and Huawei Mate 9 cameras

Shooting examples (day and night photos):

Examples of video recording (FHD, 60 fps):

Memory and memory card

The RAM of the Huawei Honor 8 Pro device is six gigabytes, while the internal memory is 64 gigabytes. This suggests that the phone can be used to store a huge amount of information. If this space is not enough, you can use a memory card. It is very easy to install and quickly synchronizes with the gadget. The memory card can reach 256 gigabytes. Honor 8 Pro reads information from the built-in memory at the same speed as the latest smartphone models from well-known manufacturers.

Introduction

As promised, the
V9 smartphone, well-known in China, has reached European stores under the name Honor 8 Pro, becoming one of the best tablet phones of the beginning of the year. Available for order are black, blue and gold models with 6 GB of RAM, the price is 549 euros. Along with the smartphone, you can choose from a 128 GB microSD memory card or a 10,000 mAh Huawei external battery, and there are other nice little things like a selfie stand.

It's a pretty reasonable price, especially when you factor in the gifts and the VR device. For fans of modern technologies, Huawei Honor 8 Pro offers a lot of interesting things. One of the big advantages of the device is the 4000 mAh battery, which fits into a thin 7 mm case.

Connection

The Honor 8 Pro model has two SIM card slots, as well as a special NFC module. Manufacturers also made sure that the device supports high-speed networks such as LTE-Advanced. Various tests have shown that the device functions perfectly during a call and there are no problems with hearing. The speaker volume is moderate and is distinguished by the purity of sound transmission.

Battery life and performance

Honor 8 Pro is designed to make the smartphone as comfortable as possible for the user. With the help of a special software shell, EMUI 5.1, manufacturers were able to improve the performance of the device, namely, to minimize the likelihood of a decrease in its performance until the phone is overloaded with data. After all, performance itself is often related to how much free space there is on the smartphone, and the software is constantly busy monitoring user actions.

Gradually, the smartphone remembers which applications its owner uses and approximately at what time. This will help him automatically load them into RAM at the right time, predicting the actions of a person who, in turn, will be able to launch the program in a few seconds. By the way, Huawei Honor 8 Pro works great with usb otg, so you can easily print documents from it, transfer files to any media, or scan an image.

Thanks to a powerful 4000 mAh battery, the smartphone can operate autonomously for 48 hours.

Interface and functionality

Honor 8 runs on Huawei EMUI 5.1 on top of the operating system

. This is the same fast and functional interface that is used in the recently launched smartphone

and which got on the device

after updating to Android Nougat. Notifications and communication toggles are now located in one place in the notification panel, and new convenient gestures have been added, like swiping from left to right to split the screen into two parts for different applications.

Speaking of gestures, the developers could add a downward swipe to expand the notification panel or a double tap to wake and lock the screen. In reality, this uses the lock button and the touchpad functionality on the fingerprint scanner, although a choice would have been nice.

The Huawei Honor 8 Pro promises a smooth virtual reality experience and even comes with a cardboard browser and a pre-installed Jaunt VR app with plenty of video content. Customers will also be able to immerse themselves in the world of Galaxy on Fire 3, the first 3D game on the Vulcan GUI. It is available for free.

operating system

The smartphone runs on the Android 7.0 operating system using the improved EMUI 5.1 software shell, which improves the system almost to the level of Android Oreo. Features of this operating system:

• There are two desktop options: one contains applications, the other contains a menu button;
• You can choose the type of notification, for example, only numbers or only signs, or refuse them altogether;
• Now you can work on the phone without taking off your gloves;
• To save an application to the cache, just click on the lock icon.

Processor and memory

The smartphone runs on a modern Huawei Kirin 960 processor with a Mali-G71 graphics chip. This is an 8-core processor that is also used in the Huawei Mate 9, its Cortex-A73 cores operate at 2.4 GHz and bring a high level of performance.

The amount of LPDDR4 RAM is as much as 6 GB, the minimum value of built-in flash memory is 64 GB, there is support for microSD memory cards. As you can see, these are high flagship level characteristics. There are no freezes or slowdowns when operating the smartphone, applications load quickly, the device is capable of storing up to ten applications in memory simultaneously without noticeable slowdown.

Bottom line

Having studied in detail the features of the Huawei Honor 8 Pro device in comparison with models of a similar type from other manufacturers, we can say that the modern Chinese device is practically in no way inferior to its competitors, but its price is much more reasonable. The main characteristics of the Honor 8 PRO indicate that this smartphone has excellent performance, is well made and is equipped with all the necessary functions.

Recently, consumers have been paying great attention to the quality of photos taken with a smartphone. The dual camera module is one of the advantages of this phone, so in comparison with phones from other brands, the Huawei Honor 8 Pro camera is in no way inferior to them.

From honor we only get usb 2.0

The set of sensors and interfaces of Honor 8 Pro can be called conservative. The LTE modem built into the SoC officially supports Cat 6, which gives download speeds of up to 300 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 50 Mbps. Unlike the Chinese version of Honor V9, the European model supports the important LTE Band 20 (800 MHz).

More about Huawei: Huawei Honor 6X Stock Firmware collections — 2018 Stock ROM update

The quality of telephony also completely convinced us. Honor only has two built-in microphones, but they provide fairly effective suppression of background noise. The main voice speaker covers a sufficient frequency range for telephone communication, and the volume is also quite sufficient. The second speaker also showed a high volume level, distortion appears quite late. But there are not enough mid frequencies, and there are practically no low frequencies. The operating modes of two speakers in a pair are not supported, unlike the same P10 Plus.

Typical for Huawei: Honor 8 Pro is equipped with a USB Type C socket, but we only get USB 2.0 speed.

Regarding the wireless network, WLAN 802.11ac is supported. For short distances, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC are available. Thanks to the built-in IR transmitter, Honor 8 Pro can control a TV and other devices; the corresponding application is installed on the smartphone. Charging, data cable and headset are connected via a USB Type C jack, but there is also a 3.5mm audio jack.

If the built-in 64 GB of memory is not enough, it can be easily expanded using a microSD card; cards up to 128 GB are supported. But, as usual, you will have to abandon the Dual-SIM function. By the way, the Dual-SIM function is different from most other Huawei and Honor models. Although the Honor 8 Pro only has one SIM card that can work on the LTE network, the second one can register on 2G and 3G networks; LTE support is available on the SIM card that previously only worked in 2G.

<>Test and review: Honor 8 Pro is the new flagship of Huawei's sister brand Honor 8 Pro | Display, battery life