It may seem strange that onlya few months after the debut of the flagship P9, Huawei essentially redesigned its hardware to release a smartphone that costs a third less. But that's exactly what the Chinese manufacturer did. At the hardware level, Honor 8 is almost indistinguishable from its more expensive predecessor.
Huawei has been in severe competition withside ZTE Axon 7, Alcatel Idol 4S, OnePlus 3 and Lenovo Moto Z. It seems that she was trying to prove that she can compete successfully in the segment of "killers" of the flagships.
The Honor brand is the giant of the Chinese industry.Under this name, only in 2015, 40 million smartphones were sold. The Chinese company sought to replicate its success in the United States. And she made a bet on Huawei Honor 8. The characteristics of the model made it unique in the world of smartphones - the exterior trim differs from anything that was ever produced. And its hardware fully corresponds to the exterior.
However, the technical characteristics of Huawei Honor 8 are one thing, and everyday use is quite another. Will the phone with long working days and increased load on the weekends?
Although the Huawei Honor 8 32GB by performancebelongs to the category of mid-range smartphones, of course, this is not the impression that leaves its design. The phone is similar to a sandwich of two glass panels with a metal frame in the middle and beveled edges, providing an additional structure and strength. Except for a few cut-outs for components such as cameras and AF sensors, its design is absolutely symmetrical.
Front reinforced glass panel lightlyCurved and creates an effect similar to the 2.5D of the iPhone. The front part is distinguished by elegant restraint and simplicity. Above the display is a wide-angle camera, LED flash and speaker. Complements the set of sensors only the Honor logo. There is nothing else. Before and the edges look like the iPhone, although the rear part looks more like the Galaxy S7.
Smartphone design is simple and minimal, notdistracting from the impressive light show created by laminated glass. It is the highlight of the model. Thanks to the patented 15-layer design, the panel refracts the incoming light into flickering patterns on the colored back panel. Each device catches light in different ways, so it's impossible to find two completely identical smartphones.
Behind is a camera with a laser AF sensor andLED flash. Below is a fingerprint scanner, edged with a thin flickering metal strip, and below it, at the very bottom, the second Honor logo is placed on the body.
To the right is an exceptionally thin power button and volume control, and to the left - a combined SIM / MicroSD card tray. Below there is a speaker, a USB Type-C port and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
In general, the design is exquisite and comfortable.Its curved edges and glass are adapted for a multi-hour set of text messages, the use of social networks and aimless web surfing. The device is light enough that it can be held for a long time without the risk of overstretching the wrist.
The smartphone works with the Emotion User interfaceInterface 4.1 (EMUI), the same as Mate 8 and P9, installed on top of the Android 6.0 platform. Although EMUI is not without merit, some tasks become more complex than they should be.
A striking example is the notification line.If you drag your finger down at the top of the screen, a semi-transparent list of messages will appear, indicating the time of their receipt. However, this implementation is much more cumbersome than the standard one. Third-party applications must have permissions to display notifications. Message deletion gestures do not always work. Quick settings, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, are switched in a separate tab.
Fortunately, the list of active applicationsit is easier to manipulate. After pressing the task switching button, a card merry-go-round of programs and services running in the background is displayed. Swipe up can stop any of them, and down - block, preventing accidental closing when clearing the memory. Users find this function very convenient.
Emotion UI offers several usefultools that Android does not have. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is the Smart Key. This is the function of assigning the fingerprint scanner to various actions. For example, with one touch you can start the camera, and three - a photo gallery. Also, gestures are supported: by default, the downward movement opens the notification panel, a quick double tap removes all notifications, and pressing and holding responds to an incoming call and disables the audio signal.
If the fingerprint reader is not available(for example, when the phone is on the table) you can use Knuckle Sense. This is a function adopted from P8, Mate 8 and P9, which allows you to run applications and perform actions by touching the joints of your fingers. For example, you can take a screen shot by tapping it twice, or record a video by making 2 quick touches 2 times. The Draw function allows you to perform certain commands using the finger joints. For example, you can start the application by drawing the letter "C" on the screen.
Huawei installed severaluseful programs. The most popular of them is Phone Manager, a kind of universal station for setting up the phone. The system optimization option closes unnecessary temporary files. The Traffic Management tool provides a graphical representation of the amount of data consumed by individual applications, daily, weekly and monthly.
The battery settings screen allows you to optimizethe effectiveness of programs and services. "Energy Optimizer" automatically scans the running programs and hardware to find the most "voracious" of them. There are many options to reduce the power consumption of the phone. For example, there is a power mode switch that allows you to change the power consumption levels (Performance, Smart and Ultra). You can also select the extreme mode, which reduces the screen resolution to 720p (1280 x 720). The "Consumption Overview" panel displays a list of applications and hardware in descending order of power consumption.
The interface UI Emotion has othercapabilities. Infrared emitter allows you to control consumer electronics like a remote control. Magic Tag assigns modes, tasks and shortcuts for NFC interaction points, such as SpeedMarks or WhizTags. The file manager groups them into categories such as Audio, Video, and Images. A simplified application that provides information about the weather, allows you to be aware of the climatic conditions in cities and regions of residence.
Although the characteristics of Huawei Honor 8 and are notthe most advanced, they are not the worst. The smartphone is equipped with a Kirin 950 processor, the same as the Mate 8. This is an 8-core chip with 4 high-performance 2.3 GHz cores and 4 less powerful 1.8 GHz frequencies, which does not exactly match the Kirin 955 potential. However, with everyday tasks phone does not cope worse. In the Huawei Honor 8 Pro, the performance was significantly improved by using the Kirin 960 processor and a 6 GB RAM.
Navigate the main screen, scrollapplications and rejection of notifications are carried out without problems. As well as viewing hundreds of Instagram photos, Snapchat messages, downloading graphically overloaded emails and working with Microsoft Word. The same goes for multitasking. Kirin 950 does a great job with several background programs and tabs of Chrome. Even on the hot dashboard of the car, there is no noticeable slowdown, which indicates an excellent system for dissipating the heat of the processor.
Unfortunately, all these remarkable characteristicsHuawei Honor 8 does not appear in the test results. The smartphone is gaining 931 points in the 3DMark Sling Shot test, which is well below the 2615 points Lenovo Moto Z. This is probably due to the relatively weak graphics chip Mali-T880.
Features of Huawei Honor 8 32GB RAM 4GB alsoare due to the i5 coprocessor, which handles lighter tasks such as speech recognition, location tracking and MP3 processing. According to the manufacturer, this solution significantly extends the life of the device between charges, and users confirm this.
Battery smartphone Huawei Honor 8 ontechnical characteristics is inferior to the latest flagship models. Its capacity, equal to 3000 mAh, is less than 3500 mAh of the Lenovo Moto Z Force battery. However, most competitors have a similar power source: Alcatel Idol 4S and Moto Z have a capacity of 3000 and 2,600 mAh, respectively. In testing, the Honor 8 battery (with automatic brightness, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile data included) can withstand a typical working day with a balance of about 25%. More demanding tasks tend to drain the battery faster - a 5-hour job as an access point significantly reduces the charge, but for the most part the phone is incredibly energy efficient. The average battery lasts 14-16 hours.
In addition, the battery is quickly charged.The smartphone Huawei Honor 8 32GB features an 18-watt charger (9 V, 2 A) reminiscent of Qualcomm's QuickCharge 2.0 technology. Theoretically, it is able to restore the battery's energy reserve to its 50% capacity within half an hour, and this is confirmed in practice. It usually takes about 15 minutes to reach 30-40%. This is inferior to the TurboPower technology of Lenovo Moto Z, which is able to provide 8 hours of operation at the same time, and slower than Quick Charge 3.0, charging up to 80% in 35 minutes, but the difference is insignificant.
The smartphone Huawei Honor 8 Pro 64GBthe screen characteristics are quite high. The resolution of the 5.2-inch display is 1.920 x 1080 pixels, like the OnePlus 3, but it's not Quad HD, like the Lenovo Moto Z Force and the ZTE Axon 7. Viewing angles are not ideal - the tilt display tends to distort the color, especially in applications and on web pages with a white background. The surface of the screen reflects too much direct sunlight, although it allows you to read its contents.
In general, the touch panel is responsive, smooth andsensitive. Thanks to the curved ergonomic 2.5D-design of the protective glass, the user enjoys sliding - the edges seem round and soft under the fingertips.
The phone Huawei Honor 8 Pro specificationsthe display has been improved: its size has grown to 5.7 ", and the resolution - up to 1440 x 2560 pixels. The same resolution went to the 6.6-inch model. Huawei Honor Note 8 performance has been enhanced by the replacement of IPS technology with Super AMOLED, albeit with a reduction in pixel density from 515 to 443 dpi. At the original, this figure is 423 t / in. In other respects, almost identical technical characteristics of Huawei Honor 8 and Magic also differ in the type and resolution of the display. The latest model is equipped with a 5.09 "2560p AMOLED-screen, which corresponds to a density of 577 dpi.
Honor 8 offers several hardware tricks.The first of these is the IR sensor. Once they were installed on almost all high-end phones, but in recent years they have become less common, since Wi-Fi and Bluetooth constantly replace the invisible light as a means of controlling TVs and household appliances. But given that only a small part of households has acquired a so-called "smart device", it can be said with certainty that infrared sensors have not quite outlived themselves. The IR sensor operates under a pre-installed application that supports, according to the manufacturer, "more than 230,000 products of 5810 brands".
Fingerprint scanners are not so rare in ourdays, but the sensor Huawei Honor 8 FRD-L09 by performance is superior to the rest. According to users, this is one of the fastest and most accurate sensors - a password-protected phone is unlocked in a fraction of a second and often until the entire finger is touched. It is also one of the safest elements: according to Huawei, it uses a level 4 encryption algorithm - the maximum in the hierarchy of mobile authentication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States.
The smartphone Huawei Honor 8 specifications6-lens wide-angle cameras comply with the specifications of the P9 model. It consists of two 12-Mp sensors with apertures of f / 2.2 and a pixel size of 1.25 microns. The camera is interesting with a lot of interesting techniques, as Honor 8 can combine the data of two sensors to improve the overall image quality. A traditional RGB sensor captures color data, and a second monochrome measures brightness. Smartphone software combines 2 streams into a single image. According to the manufacturer, Honor 8 and P9 show exceptional results in low light conditions.
This is not the only feature of the phone HuaweiHonor 8. The characteristics of the smartphone camera are improved by using a laser sensor and software phase detection to focus on objects. This function is called a "hybrid focus" by the manufacturer. Also there is a wide-aperture mode, which allows you to create bokeh effects and depth of field.
But how does all this work in reality?According to reviews, the characteristics of Huawei Honor 8 allow the smartphone to perfectly cope with the duties of the camera. The phone makes clear, largely noise-free images in conditions where the only source of light is the setting sun. No less impressive are the pictures after sunrise, in artificial lighting and in dim rooms. The dark areas are richly detailed and do not have the granularity typical of ordinary telephone cameras, and bright colors contrast sharply with dark shadows.
Customizable bokeh adds an extra layerfine-tuning. The user can change the focus point after the image was taken, so that you can make incredible manipulations with objects that dominate the foreground.
Monochrome photos are clear. Black and white sensor allows you to get clear night shots with an impressive degree of depth and contrast.
However, the speed of focusing noticeably disappointed. The smartphone takes time to select the subject and focus on it. A lack of lighting only aggravates this problem.
Users called the P9 camera a "revelation", placing it on a par with the iPhone 6S Plus, LG G5 and Galaxy S7, and the same for Honor 8.
Unfortunately, the same smart design does not apply to the smartphone software.
Huawei Honor 8 front camera oncharacteristics almost does not differ from the back. The 8-megapixel images with the f / 2.2 sensor are equally crisp and bright, albeit with a lower resolution. Unfortunately, the absence of an LED flash makes it difficult to shoot in a dim environment. But the Perfect Selfie application slightly improves the result: it takes pictures of the face at different angles, softening the dimness of the picture.
The camera software used forits settings, is at least universal. Scrolling to the left brings up a library of common modes, including panorama, interval shooting, HDR and slow motion. More exotic settings are also available: for photographing food, scanning documents, night shooting and lighting, which allows you to remove the lights of moving cars and the flow of water.
Pro-camera modes offer more control over theits hardware. Users can adjust the exposure, ISO, point and type of focus, shutter speed, exposure and white balance. The level sensor ensures that the images are aligned with the horizon. To compose the composition will help a grid of lines, the distance between which is determined by the golden section and Fibonacci numbers.
Experienced photographers, no doubt, will appreciate the possibility of saving photos in the RAW format, allowing programs such as Photoshop to accurately adjust the colors of the picture.
Huawei, like HTC and Motorola before it, is newBuyers are offered a grace period: if you accidentally drop the phone and break the screen within 3 months after purchase, the manufacturer will repair it or provide a replacement. This is an addition to the annual warranty, available to all buyers of Honor 8.
The manufacturer's limited warranty coversdefects resulting from production. It does not cover accidental damage, such as bumps, scratches or moisture. Repair is provided free of charge, but does not include delivery, and claims expire after 12 months from the date of purchase.
The manufacturing company has achieved thatis called the miracle of the supply chain: almost every high-performance component of a P9 phone costing $ 600 is offered in a device that is sold for a third cheaper: $ 400 for 32 GB and $ 450 for 64 GB. This deserves praise.
The cost reduction required to cut somecharacteristics of the smartphone. The Huawei Honor 8 touch screen is not as bright, colorful or sharp as the Alcatel Idol 4S and Lenovo Moto Z, and it has less RAM, for example, compared to OnePlus 3. The design, although not without taste, is derived. Software needs fixing. Nevertheless, these are the only serious disadvantages of a smartphone, which is an impressive achievement for any phone, especially in this price range.
Honor 8, perhaps not the most budgetary model, butit depends on the user's priorities. If you need an incredible camera, an impeccable fingerprint scanner, an IR emitter and great customization options, then this smartphone will be a very profitable acquisition. If the advantage is given to the quality of the screen and performance, then it is better to refer to ZTE Axon 7 or OnePlus 3.
