[Review] Honor 8 – Mirror Magic

Performance & Camera
On the hardware front, the Honor 8 comes with a 5.2-inch Full HD IPS LTPS display with a crisp 423ppi sheathed in 2.5D Corning Gorilla glass. Even the rear is sheathed with the same stuff; that combined with the smoothly rounded chamfering makes it so that the front and back offer a seamless, rounded finish.

Under the hood, the phone runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow overlaid with Honor’s own EMUI 4.1 user interface on a HiSilicon Kirin 950 2.3GHz octacore processor. The Kirin 950 first saw service on their flagship Mate 8 last year and comes with a quartet of Cortex-A72 cores running at 2.3GHz to handle the heavy lifting and a quartet of Cortex-A53 1.8GHz cores to handle the grunt work. Paired with this is a generous 4GB RAM and 64GB of onboard storage augmented by the hybrid SIM card slot that can take up to 128GB cards.

Under benchmarks, the phone performed in a very capable fashion. In Geekbench, it yielded a CPU single core compute score of 1692 and a multicore score of 5,333.

Under PC Mark Work 2.0, it yielded a performance score of 5,140, making it quite a solid workhorse. Under SlingShot via 3DMark, it earned a score of 959. In Antutu, it managed a respectable score of 86,955. In Epic Citadel, it managed to get a frame rate of 59.1FPS under 1,800 x 1080 resolution and Ultra High Quality settings which is quite an achievement. As far as the pixel crunching potential of the Honor 8 goes, it’s an immensely capable performer.

When put to the test under practical field conditions, it performed like a champ. Assuming you don’t kick in ROG mode, the 1080P screen serves up luscious, crisp imagery and the hardware was easily able to handle everything thrown at it including Asphalt 8: Airborne, Star Wars: Force Arena and multiple open browsing windows as well as videos without keeling over. ROG mode dials it all down to a 720P screen for more battery life; there’s a bit of a tradeoff but if you’re away from the mains, this is a fantastic thing to have and you barring the slightly less crisp display, you’re not losing much out of the whole affair either. Regardless, the screen is viewable under direct sunlight be it in ROG mode or at full throttle at 1080P with very legible text onscreen.

The rear fingerprint reader is clickable and is customisable too with the ability to assign different actions like turning on the rear LED light, firing up the camera or activating apps via an assignable double button press, a long press or a quick single press it. It’s one of those interesting innovations that you didn’t think you’d need but which ends up essential once you’ve gotten used to it. If you eschew the rear fingerprint reader, the Honor 8 still has other options for shortcuts in the form of their KnuckleSense tech that lets you use your knuckle to sketch letters on the touchscreen to launch the browser, camera or music player. It’s handy though it takes practice to use your knuckle to scrawl symbols onscreen.

The Honor 8 places a lot of stock in its rear camera array and it comes with not one but two 12-MP cameras with F/2.2 apertures with one that shoots in mono and one that shoots in colour. While it’s tempting to say it’s a matchup for their P9 which came out slightly earlier, the Honor 8 itself lacks a dedicated mono mode like the P9 though you can tinker around with filters to achieve the desired effect. The usual modes such as panorama, time lapse, manual and HDR along with a cornucopia of filters cover the gamut of the most common shooting scenarios though you can immediately observe the effects of filters and manual settings onscreen. Huawei’s distinctive light painting mode is present and correct on the phone and allows for you to capture rivers of light on highways, shooting stars and flowing water which comes in handy if you want to bring out the auteur in you.

Across the usual range of photographic subjects, the Honor 8 notably offersshots with rather good detail and under standard auto conditions, the phone was capable of capturing some very share-worthy snaps. Even at dusk or in dimly lit conditions, the Honor 8 did a great job with good dynamic range, great colours and detail.

It’s also capable of some rather delicious software-based bokeh with the choice to edit it post-shot with either foreground or background defocus and it looks mostly accurate though it occasionally fumbles with subjects with complex backgrounds and foregrounds. Unfortunately, the phone lacks optical image stabilisation so you’ll need steady hands to get best results when taking something under challenging light conditions from the Honor 8.

The Honor 8 is capable of capturing video, capping at 1080p@60fps with the noticeable omission of 4K video capability but Full HD is more than sufficient for capturing a video or two at social occasions. Under most scenarios, the Honor 8 offers a very capable rear snapper for its price range.

Page 1	Build quality & Design
Page 2	Performance & Camera
Page 3	Price, Battery Life & Conclusion