The Honor 8 is Honor’s newest flagship phone, now hitting the U.S. market and Europe at a competitive price-point. Offering excellent silicon and a glass and metal design for $400, the Honor 8 is in an interesting pricing bracket with even more interesting competitors.
Can this device honor its specifications and stay toe-to-toe with the new wave of affordable flagships?
In this review, we’ll take an in-depth dive into the Honor 8. Rather than listing specs and talking about how the experience felt, this feature attempts to provide a thorough look with contents relevant to our reader base. At XDA, our reviews are not meant to tell a user whether a phone is worth buying or not — instead, we try to lend you the phone through our words and help you come to the decision by yourself. Before getting started, let’s get the specification sheet out of the way:
Device Name:
Honor 8
Release Date/Price
Available Now, Starts at U$D 399
Android Version
6.0.1 Marshmallow (Emotion UI 4.1)
Display
5.2 inch 1080p LTPS LCD (423 ppi)
Chipset
HiSilicon Kirin 950: Octa Core, 4x 2.3GHz Cortex-A72 + 4x 1.8GHz Cortex-A53, Mali-T880 MP4 GPU
Battery
3,000mAh, Charging at 9V 2A
RAM
4GB LPDDR4 (3GB variant outside USA)
Sensors
Fingerprint, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, Ambient Light, Electronic Compass
Storage
32GB | 64GB, microSD expandibility upto 128GB via hybrid SIM slot
Connectivity
USB 2.0 Type C, Dual nano-SIM slot, 3.5mm audio jack
Dimensions
145.5 x 71 x 7.5 cm (~72.5% screen-to-body)
Rear Camera
12MP Dual Camera (Color + Monochrome), Laser Autofocus, f/2.2, 1080p @ 60fps
Weight
153g
Front Camera
8MP, f/2.4
Index
Design
Software – UI
Software – Features & UX
Performance
CPU & System
GPU & Gaming
Memory & Storage
Real World UX
Camera
Display
Battery Life
Audio
Development & Future Proofing
Final Thoughts & Conclusion
Design
The Honor 8 marks an important shift for Honor in the realm of build quality, in particular because of the materials transition from the tried-and-true aluminum to a full glass coating. This comes at a time where other OEMs are trying their hand at a similar design, especially after the success of Samsung’s glass devices. But the latter were so renowned precisely because of the level of precision and attention to detail that Samsung could achieve due to their bleeding-edge fabrication process. The Honor 8 thus has a lot to prove in order to duke it out head-to-head with the more expensive devices that sport glass backs and metal trims. How does the Honor 8’s premium build hold up against the rest and at its price?
Let’s begin with the star of the show: Honor has tackled the challenge of producing a high-quality glass back design that feels both solid and comfortable, on a budget. The back of the Honor 8 has a slippery and clear glass coating, and it’d cover the entire surface if it wasn’t for the very subtle non-glass trim that serves as the interface between the metal edge and the actual glass pane. This facilitates the transition of materials, and Honor has made it flow rather seamlessly, as it’s only visible by keen observers. This creates the illusion of the glass back blending into the metal, and while visually it is just a trick, functionally it means that there are no sharp edges and the device is ultimately rather comfortable, with a slight curve that makes holding the phone very pleasant, even when holding it tightly (and you will often have to, more on this below). It’s also worth pointing out that there is no camera protrusion making this device extremely flat, and able to slide across tables at the slightest of angles.
The back is adorned by very tiny lines in radial patterns that allow the device to shine in interesting ways under sunlight.
The back is adorned by very tiny lines in radial patterns that allow the device to shine in interesting ways under sunlight, also virtue of a 15-layer construction, for an effect that’s rather original and seldom found outside of a couple alternatives. This is more evident on the blue variant, which produces different-hue blues that shine and bend across the surface. There’s also an Honor logo at the bottom, under the glass, in a silver font. Under it you’ll find the (rather tiny) text “powered by Huawei”, “Made in China”, and the Model number. Luckily the verbose part of the design is very small, and we’ve seen various devices hide all sorts of logos and certifications on their backs recently, so the Honor 8 isn’t alone here. That being said, this could be annoying to those that want a cleaner, more minimal design or dislike branding.
Above the center you will find the fingerprint scanner, similar to the circular “Nexus Imprint” that won our affection in 2015. There are a lot of good things about this fingerprint scanner, so stick around for the UX-centric sections of this review to learn just what makes it one of the best implementations out there. The fingerprint sensor is not covered by glass and it’s a different hue than the rest of the back, but it doesn’t look out of place and the silver trim nicely compliments all the metal and silver on the device.
At the very top you’ll find the double camera setup (no Leica cameras means no Leica branding), a laser autofocus slit, and a dual-tone flash setup. The arrangement is quite attractive and is one of the main attention-grabbers of the device’s design, as many people asked me throughout my review period just what this phone was, and why it had two cameras. Once more we must mention the lack of protrusion, a rarity in today’s mobile world.
The trim along the edge of the device is one of the better-realized parts of the phone. The metal band has a slight grainy look to it that produces a gradient effect when hit by light. It is very sturdy and also has two sets of rather thin chamfers, on both the top and bottom. These are as shiny as you’d expect and they tie in well with the rest of the phone’s design. The antennae bands are all around the bottom and on the sides, with the top only holding an infrared port and a microphone. The bottom holds the USB type C port, the 3.5mm headphone jack to the left, and one speaker grille to the right.
The SIM tray can hold both a microSD slot and a nanoSIM, and blends seamlessly with the edge (down to the grainy pattern). In my opinion, the feel of the buttons are disappointing. I hope this is only limited to my review unit(s), but even though both buttons are decently clicky, they felt somewhat loose and the power button in particular could rock with very slight finger movement. I asked others that have an Honor 8 if they had this issue, and most did not. Buttons in phones typically have wide variation due to issues with fitting due to the imperfectability of the manufacturing process at such a scale, but this being one of my pet peeves I opted for using the fingerprint scanner click to turn off my screen (more on this in the Software UX section). I do feel like other companies provide more focusing on ensuring less variation, though, as I’ve never had such a loose power button out of the box.
The front of the Honor 8 is conservative, if not a bit dull. It is well-executed nevertheless, and while there are no standouts, there are also no things to really criticize. The notification light is interestingly-placed on the right side of the speaker, which aids in minimizing the amount of elements on the front. The Honor branding at the bottom is clear, although I would argue capacitive keys (and the option to use them over software keys) would make better use of the bottom bezel. The top has the front camera and proximity sensor, as well as a speaker. The side bezels are thin for the 5.2 inch screen, and the black border around the display when it’s turned on is rather thin, resulting in an above-average screen-to-body ratio of around 72.5%. It’s also worth pointing out that the display is rather raised, more so than on other devices, which can often make it feel printed on. It’s technically 2.5D glass, but you won’t notice as the curvature at the very edge has a miniscule radius, so finding legitimate screen protectors shouldn’t be hard.
Software — User Interface
When I reviewed the Honor 5X back in January, the user interfaced packed with EMUI was one of the points that warranted more attention, as the experience resulting from Huawei/Honor’s aesthetic decisions is very different from what most users are used to through other skins, especially Stock Android. In a few words, EMUI is not the kind of UI you’ll easily grow to love if you are a fan of Stock Android, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things to love about its layouts, design elements and theming capabilities. We’ll take a look at each important System UI section and other areas of frequent interaction, avoiding subjective interpretation as much as possible.
By default, EMUI is an interface that completely trails away from Google’s Material Design guidelines and opts for its own design language, bringing a completely different experience altogether. This is first seen with the launcher, which comes with no app drawer for organization. The launcher has big and vibrant icons in its 4-column default, but luckily you can modify its grid size. Huawei’s iconography is full of rounded squares with muted non-primary colors, and the wallpapers that come with the phone resemble those of other flagships, in particular Samsung’s latest devices as seen below. There isn’t much in the way of customization, other than changing transitions, homescreen looping and opting for badge icons for unread notifications on a few stock applications. Other than that, you can choose to auto align apps or shake them to realign manually.
Swiping down reveals an app, contacts and messages search menu, as well as your recently-used apps, It’s a simple setup that works well, and there’s a further-simplified alternative as well in the settings menu. The launcher is an aspect that many of our readers are quick to swap for Nova or Action Launcher, but for users wanting to keep it Stock there won’t be any headaches in the EMUI built-in solution — if you can tolerate the lack of an app drawer and the overall design language. The app opening transition of stock is the now-dated Zoom-In of earlier Android days.
The notification pane brings back the background blur by default, but this can be themed away (more on that below). It’s worth noting that it’s not dynamic blur as seen in a few elements of other OEM ROMs, it uses a screenshot of your screen and does not blur animated video, but this saves CPU cycles for a rather mundane task (and the alpha is tuned so that the background is not very visible anyway). Notifications are right-biased as the left area has a timeline for you to click tell the time of arrival, and for some reason heads-up notifications cannot be swiped to the sides for dismissals (which one can get used to, but we question the intent). At the top you will find a “shortcuts” (toggles) tab, and at the bottom left there is a “clear all” button. Swiping to the right or tapping on the shortcuts tab shows toggles and the brightness-slider. The toggles setup standard affairs except for a screenshot button, and it’s also worth noting that screenshots have edit, scroll capture and share shortcuts on the screenshot animation, for you to quickly act upon what you capture.
The recents menu is laid out differently than on stock, with horizontal cards and previews and with a “clear all” trashcan at the bottom, as well as a free RAM counter. Scrolling is smooth, but not necessarily fluid by design as it tends to make the center-most tab sticky. You can access App Info by long-pressing, but there is no tool-tip or animation prompting you in the right direction. Swiping up clears the application, while swiping down locks it down and prevents it from being dismissed by the “clear all” button. On every press, the app in the center will be your last-used app, to make multitasking easier (no last-app navigation bar gesture by default).
The iconography of EMUI is big in size, and in no way minimal. The battery indicator is laid horizontally, and the battery percentage is put beside it. With no readily-available System UI tuner, there is little room for notifications (tip: disable carrier logo from the right side in the notification settings, giving you room for 3 more notifications). However, something I learned to appreciate is that app notification icons in the status bar feature small, colorful icons dictated by the notification itself. This way, a Hangouts message displays the avatar of the relevant contact at the top, which makes it easy to know what’s what in your status bar, and whether your notifications merit a swipe down and quick glance or read. Under another design language, this would look out of place, but EMUI is so different and it ultimately doesn’t clash within its scheme.
The settings menu is colorful and a bit disorganized. There is no battery section, for example, and to access it one must dig through a few menus (Advanced Settings -> Battery Manager -> Consumption Level), and then a few more to arrive to the screen-on-time number that we love to keep track off. Ignoring the organization issues, instructions and feature descriptions are easy to understand, with visual aids that help understand some features — and this is good, because there are many.
The default color palette, iconography and blurry glass intrinsically clash with Material Design.
Applications also share the blurry glass and white clean look, and they have turned out easy to use during my review period. Of course, though, these can be replaced for different-looking alternatives. And the System UI itself has a useful theme engine that can help you change much of EMUI, including the notification bar and toggles color scheme, their icons, the settings menu iconography and palette, the launcher icons, and more. There are Stock Android themes, for example, which get rid of the blur in the notification panel. Ultimately, the layout is too different in most areas for this to feel remotely close to AOSP, and darker themes won’t make use of an AMOLED display given the phone’s LCD panel, but there are some themes worth trying out and this has personally helped me enjoy EMUI a lot more. The default color palette, iconography and blurry glass intrinsically clash with Material Design, but themes can minimize this by a large margin.
Software — Features & UX
EMUI is simply one of the most feature-packed user interfaces available. To jot down every tiny addition and functional advantage over Stock Android would take far more room than I am willing to allocate to this section, so I’ll focus on the fundamentals and every feature I believe users would care about. EMUI’s features change from revision to revision, so not everything is exactly as seen on the Mate 8, Honor 5X, and even the P9 from earlier this year. But in spirit, the ROM remains the same: it aims to offer everything you’d need, and then some.
Let’s begin with my favorite feature: smart key. You might recall that in my Honor 5X review I noted that one of my favorite additions to the fingerprint scanner was the ability to use it for extra functions, like tapping to go back or swiping down for the notification panel. You can still swipe down to access the panel, and also press it to take pictures, answer calls and stop alarms, but the fingerprint scanner is an actual button now, allowing for quick access to apps or functions with the screen on or off.
The fingerprint scanner is an actual capacitive button now.
Honor allows you to customize the button with tools voice recording. screenshot shortcut, or launch applications, which you can bind to single press, double press and/or longpress. The option to turn the screen off is, sadly, not present by default.
Luckily, you can use any “Screen Off” app and trigger it that way, although there is no way to disable double-press meaning single presses will always have a slight delay while the phone waits for additional input. This became my go-to way to turn off the screen given the lack of a stiff power button. It’s also worth noting that the fingerprint scanner is really fast, frequently unlocking my phone by accident while I unnoticeably slid my finger across its back.
At the toggles, you’ll find a few useful options including screen recording, ultra-battery saving (you are probably familiar with the concept by now), a “floating dock” that acts like an impromptu PIE menu (back, home, recents, screen off and RAM clearance keys), and an “eye-protection” mode which filters blue light to give you a sort of “night mode” as seen on other popular devices.
You can customize the navigation bar, and also add an “open notification panel” key to the right. There are other shortcuts in the form of motion controls, such as flipping to mute, picking up the phone to reduce the sound of alarms or calls, raising the phone to your ear to start or end calls, or tilting the phone to swipe through launcher screens (why? I am not sure). Then, you have knuckle gestures.
With them, you can use your knuckles on the screen to capture a normal, scrolling (very useful) or cropped screenshot, or initiate screen-recording. You can also use your knuckles to draw letters in order to open applications (letters ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘m’ and ‘w’, so four shortcuts in total). These work surprisingly well for the easier gestures and scrolling screenshots, although the app shortcuts and cropped screenshots are not as fluid.
You also have one-handed UI settings, including a mini-screen view triggered by swiping across the navigation bar, and a shifting keyboard accessed by tapping an arrow during text input. Huawei also incorporated its own voice controls, including voice wakeup to find your phone (“Dear Honor”) and quick calling which allows you to call by saying a contact’s name after pressing volume down while the screen is off. You can also answer calls with voice control and quickly get on speaker mode.
Huawei also incorporates “smart headphone controls”, which is an interesting take on the ability to control music through wired headphones with 3 buttons (action, volume up and volume down). It changes the volume up behavior to favorite a song when double pressing, and enable or disable shuffle by doing the same on volume down. The action button is then used for playback control with multiple taps, too.
The Honor 8 also comes with a smart remote controller app for it’s IR sensor, which is increasingly rare in today’s smartphones. Adding remote controls is easy and after the setup you’ll be managing your home devices without hassle. Honor also includes a batch of easily-replaceable apps like its own clock and e-mail client, and sadly bundles some applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Booking.Com, News Republic, Lyft, and Shazam. Whether these are bloatware or not is up to you (to me, they surely are), but know that you can fully uninstall them.
Suggestion: Look, but don’t touch.
You will also find a “phone manager” app that acts as a hub for your system health check-up. This includes quick access to “system optimization” to clear memory/cache (and kill backgrounds apps, of course…), a traffic manager to monitor your data (or add a lockscreen reminder), a “harassment filter” to block offensive keyword or specific phone numbers (triggered?), and a way to lock apps to your fingerprint or PIN so that others cannot access them. You can also choose which apps run while the screen is off, either protecting all or picking the ones you think won’t impact your battery life, or that have notifications you need. The system cleanup features are frankly useless, and Honor’s relationship with CleanMaster (affecting EU) makes me worry the company will further implement such systems. If you ask me, this an increasingly-annoying trend with OEMs skins.
Finally, there is the oh-so-important battery consumption section, which is missing from the settings for whatever reason. From here you can enable ROG power saving, which makes the phone run at 720p — something I really don’t recommend, given the savings are marginal and the pixel density drops from 423 PPI to 282 PPI, which makes a significant difference.
Then you’ll have a power usage firewall for power-intensive apps (and notifications can warn you when apps are draining too much battery in the background), your battery history, and power plans. This last bit is very important and we’ll expand upon them on the battery and performance sections, but basically you can opt for a Smart profile that adjusts CPU and network usage for a reasonable balance, a Performance mode which allows the CPU to stay at higher frequencies, and an Ultra mode as mentioned earlier.
Performance
This phone comes with a rather impressive processing package for just $400. It is true, however, that at that bracket you begin to see devices sporting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820. But the Honor 8’s processing solution is different than that of most competing chipsets, as it’s comprised of HiSilicon’s Kirin 950, the same chipset we saw in the Huawei Mate 8. Huawei released this chipset in late 2015, with just enough room to claim the performance crown for CPU prowess. The Kirin 950 packs an octa-core big.LITTLE configuration with four efficiency-focused A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz, and four A72 performance-oriented cores.
The latter are the star of the show, as the Cortex A72 core is designed to provide up to 50% faster performance-per-MHz than the A57 cores which dominated in 2015. These cores are not only faster, but significantly more power-efficient, but the fiercest competition has also gotten up to speed with the Kryo cores in the Snapdragon 820. Coupled with the 16nm process size, the specification sheet sets high hopes for the SoC. The Honor 8 shares a similar GPU to that of the Exynos 8890, the Mali-T880. There is an important difference, however, as the Honor 8’s Mali-T880 MP4 features 4 cores as opposed to the Exynos 8890’s 12, although these have higher individual clock speeds as well. While this is the weaker aspect of the SoC, we found it still packs a worthy punch. So, how does the Kirin 950 as a whole measure up to the competition?
CPU & System
The Kirin 950 found in the Honor 8 benefits from the big.LITTLE architecture that began truly shining in the past couple of years. With smart global task scheduling to decide the utilized core arrangement at any given time, chipsets under this setup can achieve some impressive multi-core performance. This is precisely what we see with the Kirin 950: its single core performance as reported by benchmarks is lower than the competitions, but multi-core performance surpasses Qualcomm’s latest and greatest. When it comes to CPU-centric tasks in benchmarks like AnTuTu, the Kirin 950 does an excellent job at beating the Snapdragon 820 found in devices like the OnePlus 3. Overall, the CPU side of things is one of the better aspects of the Kirin 950 and the Honor 8 in general, as this is one of the main items to look forward to when looking for excellent performance.
While the Kirin 950 does great in abstract tests with discrete computations, it also does an excellent job at real-world oriented tests such as basemark OS II and PCMark. It does not achieve as high a score as its Huawei-branded brethren, but it still shows respectable results — OS optimizations play a big factor in this benchmark, and the overall score surpasses the average achieved by devices like the Galaxy S7, but does not quite reach the level of the OnePlus 3. The average is weighted down by the writing and photo-editing tests, though, and the latter is understandable given the devices’ less-powerful graphics capabilities. BaseMark OS II shows a similar story, but all in all this phone can compete with some of the most expensive and decked-out phones in the market for half the price, which is nothing to scoff at.
Performance over time is particularly excellent on the Honor 8, but here we must begin differentiating between the two power profiles the Honor 8 comes with, “smart” and “performance”. The former offers a more-balanced approach to CPU scaling, whereas the latter focuses on squeezing out the Kirin 950 with less regards for battery life and thermals.
That being said, both modes output very solid results although with a different behavior: ‘smart’ does not necessarily peak under initial pressure, whereas performance maintains its peak potential for longer, and extremely well at that. On the CPU side, neither of the power plans sees significant throttling, and what’s more, the maximum temperature for the Geekbench endurance test was only 32.8°C | 91°F — far lower than what we saw on other chipsets. This is likely a result of both the A72 cores and the small process size, and the efficiency ultimately carries onto the real world as well, as the Honor 8 is extremely cool to the touch in every situation sans intense camera usage.
GPU & Gaming
The GPU side of things is sadly the more underwhelming aspects of this processing package. The Mali-T880 MP4 GPU outputs results that are more than enough to carry the Honor 8’s 1080p screen well, and on-screen tests reflect this well. However, when put up against devices with newer chipsets on either on-screen tests or benchmarks that natively render at 1080p, the Honor 8 is left far behind, not just by 2016 devices but also much of what we saw in 2015 as well. Truth be told, the Mali-T880 MP4 is hardly commensurable with the Mali-T880 MP12 or the Adreno 530, but once you travel back to the Adreno 420 found in the Snapdragon 805, you begin finding similarities in peak performance.
Albeit disappointing when looked at a flagship perspective, it ultimately means little for the real-world user experience due to the 1080p display. Unsurprisingly, though, the Honor 8 also fares rather well under pressure on the GPU side, but only on performance mode. Running a 10-consecutive 3DMark test on both power plans showed “smart” losing over 25% of its initial performance and reaching close to 37.8°C | 100°F in the process, whereas on ‘performance’ not only was the initial (and peak) score higher, but it also only lost 8% of it by the end of the run despite reaching nearly the same temperature. This is also something we noticed when running other benchmarks and while gaming. GFXBench, where the peak on “smart” was lower than the initial score on ‘performance’. Sadly, the latter loses closes to a third of its peak framerate.
Interestingly enough, we didn’t find the lower graphics performance to be disappointing at all when gaming and measuring through GameBench, neither in terms of framerates nor in throttling. In fact, the Honor 8 manages to mostly-top the framerate of most complex 3D games today, and in our tests we only saw very small and contained periods of severe throttling which lasted only around 5 seconds at a time per 10 minute gameplay session, predominantly on GTA: San Andreas. Other than those short-lived framerate losses, the Honor 8 is capable enough of performing excellently at most games out today even at maximum settings, a feat that is not limited to latest-generation SoCs like it once was. Truth be told, the level of GPU performance of late 2014 chipsets very-nearly allowed for maxing out games like Asphalt 8 then, and it still does today. If you do have any issues, the 720p mode will certainly give you the necessary boost to achieve a maximum framerate at the expense of effective pixel density.
Despite the more-than-acceptable gaming performance, though, the GPU of the Kirin 950 remains the weakest link of the processing package due to lower peaks and worse sustained performance during intense stress than other flagship chipsets, and gamers looking to remain future proof, or people who need the phone for other GPU-intensive applications, should first try and calculate the mileage they’d get out of this device. Last but not least, there is a 720p resolution mode for power-savings that has the by-product of increasing GPU performance, but as pointed out later in this article as well, it simply isn’t worth the pixel density trade-off, particularly when gaming or doing other visual experiences.
RAM & Storage
The 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM that this review unit ships with was more than apt at the kind of tasks that I threw at it. The phone can easily store around 12 to 14 applications in memory, and also multiple heavy 3D games, without killing background processes. Even then, cached reloads are rather fast thanks to the SoC and storage solution. I have experienced some quirks with memory management where applications had to reload from cache despite no interaction with power-saving prompts or features, and it’s worth noting that by default the system kills non-whitelisted background applications upon locking the screen, so be sure to tweak those settings.
These kind of practices and the trend of adding “system tuners” (often powered by companies like CleanMaster) shouldn’t exist in the Honor 8 or any of today’s smartphones, frankly, and you should most certainly ignore anything suggesting you to kill applications simply for using them (which has happened with Hangouts and other applications). Finally, while 4GB of RAM is still a standard in 2016, 6GB RAM devices like the OnePlus 3 and Axon 7 do come at cheaper or similar prices. Users outside of the United States can opt for a further-cheaper 3GB variant, but that might be too big a sacrifice for those looking to keep the phone for a few years.
Honor 8
Sequential
Random
Read Speed
246.9MB/s
39.5MB/s
Write Speed
94.4MB/s
27MB/s
The storage of the Honor 8 is barely commensurable with the higher-end solutions out there, and sadly, alternatives at this price-point like the OnePlus 3 and Axon 7 managed to offer UFS 2.0 for impressive theoretical and real-world file transfer speeds. That being said, only the latter has microSD support like the Honor 8, and the ability to couple 64GB of storage with up to 128GB on a microSD card is a good synergy for the dual camera on this device. There is no adoptable storage in the settings, though.
Real World Performance
The Kirin 950 is simply a remarkable SoC for real-world applications. One would think that the tremendous feature quantity of EMUI would mean that the experience would be bogged down, cluttered, and ultimately laggy. Luckily, reality couldn’t be further from such a grim scenario, a far cry from the all-too-familiar bloated ROM scenarios Android was known for in its infancy, and that some OEMs still continue today, with the recently-released Note 7 showing embarrassing performance in comparison. While EMUI on the Snapdragon 615 of the Honor 5X meant frequent stutters and odd delays, Honor must have done some optimization with Huawei’s in-house SoC, as EMUI flies no matter the power profile you choose, and regardless of the changes made to Android.
Scrolling lists is not just as good as any other flagship, but better, and I’ve found very few slowdowns or stutters while browsing news feeds or Play Store listings. GPU Profiling reveals rather solid scrolling performance all-around, both in the System UI and inside applications. Activities launch quickly, too, and the phone is very snappy not just because of the SoC, but also because of above-average screen latency. Lists flow fluidly under the finger, and actions respond instantly, so general in-app performance is a joyful experience.
The phone’s fluidity carries over to app opening speeds and app-switching. Both hot and cold app opening times are up there with the best of 2016 from competing chipsets, and the 4GB of RAM are able to hold, on average, 14 to 16 applications in memory at once. That being said, there is a dark side to EMUI’s memory management once the screen turns off: by default EMUI kills applications that are not whitelisted to run in the background while the screen is locked, likely to save battery. Once you tweak this setting, though, the phone behaves properly for your favorite apps. If you do get this device, it is paramount that you inspect these settings given that background notifications on standby can be indefinitely delayed,
During regular usage, the phone keeps a consistent temperature around or under 29°C | 84.2°F, and the bulk of the heat is concentrated on the top-left corner of the device (looking from the back), meaning you do not get in immediate contact with it would the phone happen to get hot. Once more, we must point out that there are two power profiles, “Smart” and “Performance”. For nearly every real-world application, both share the same level of performance. The bulk of my review period was done on the “performance” setting, and I haven’t noticed any significant issues with heat management nor battery drain. The Honor 5X needed to be under the “performance” plan to achieve reasonable speed, but the Honor 8 does just fine on the default setting.
There is also the previously-mentioned ROG power-saving feature, which lowers the screen’s resolution to 720p for increased efficiency. It is true that 720p would mean less stress on the GPU in particular, with lower-quality assets being rendered and cached. That being said, there is no real-world performance gain from this outside of gaming, and many 3D games allow you to specifically set rendering resolution from within their settings anyway. Moreover, dropping the pixel density to 282 PPI makes a significant difference in visual fidelity, which is immediately noticeable if you choose a crisp 1080p wallpaper for your homescreen. The option is certainly nice to squeeze extra performance or battery in a pinch, but for most applications both savings are miniscule.
Monitoring background activities and RAM consumption once again reinforces the idea that EMUI does not waste away its resources, nor is bogged down by useless processes. The processor scaled predictably with the A72 cores spiking upon opening applications working together while scrolling.
There is little else to detail: all things considered, the Honor 8’s real-world performance is remarkable for a device at its price-point, and for a phone running such a feature-packed and aesthetically-modified user interface. It offers flagship performance, hands-down, and it even surpasses other (much, much more expensive) flagships we’ve tried out this year. The impressive CPU, capable storage solution and decent-enough GPU coupled with Honor’s optimizations, such as a touted proprietary file system, result in a pleasant experience through the entire operating system no matter what goal you need to accomplish using your smartphone.
Camera
As you would expect from the Honor 8’s dual-camera setup, this is one of the better-aspects of the device. At the $400 bracket, it’s rather hard to find phones with above-average cameras, and the Honor 8 builds its hardware and software around trying to stand out in that space. While we’ve seen OEMs constantly try to catch up with camera giants like Samsung – who has slowed down its camera evolution, likely due to small competition – it is arguably a much harder task to do on a budget. Can the Honor 8 stand up against more expensive devices? Depends on what you look for, but the Honor 8 takes after the P9 to offer detail through capture hardware, and flexibility through software.
Let’s start with the camera UI and UX. The Honor 8’s EMUI features a very traditional approach with a shutter button on the right side as well as a gallery shortcut (and the gallery has a camera shortcut by sliding the image album down) and a “switch to video” button. To the left you will find extra options depending on your shooting mode, such as switch to the other camera, filters, flash, or the shallow depth of field mode (more on that later). There are also 3 “tabs” you can access by swiping around the viewfinder: one for shooting modes (including pro photo and pro video, beauty mode and video, panorama, HDR, Good Food, timelapse, light painting and nightshot). The other panel allows you to change resolution, enable a grid, configure a timer, enable smile capture and object tracking, and also default image adjustment like brightness, saturation and contrast (for auto-mode).
When it comes to camera speed, the Honor 8 doesn’t disappoint. The camera app opens really fast, usually in less than 400ms, and it can also be launched from the lockscreen at the same speed. There is also a quick snapshot feature, by double pressing the volume button when the device is off — the phone will instantly launch the camera and grab a picture of whatever it is pointed at, then display the time it took to capture it (typically less than a second). Focusing speed is also above average for the price, although automatic focusing still takes over half a second to find the new target. Taking pictures in both burst mode and through button spam is fast and reliable, with no odd delays. However, the camera does not have auto-HDR, which is what usually slows down other phones. One would argue that it would be a negative point for those used to intelligent HDR (or HDR+) that compliments auto-mode, but the dynamic range of the Honor 8 is already better than most of its competitors without enabling the setting.
Going further into image quality, the 12MP main camera is aided by a 12MP monochrome camera that assists in obtaining more information regarding light and contrast, which the Honor 8 uses by merging the two images and producing one sharper result. The company claims it allows for up to 3 times the light in low-light situations, and while we definitely see a low-light improvement over similarly-priced smartphones, it still is outperformed by devices like the Nexus 6P and Galaxy S7 Edge. Nevertheless, detail retention is good, macro/focusing distance allows for good close-up shots, and exposure management is one of the better ones I’ve seen — I’ve never had the kind of severe blowup that plague budget devices. Color is also very good, a notch on the saturated side, although HDR does make a noticeable difference.
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