Huawei Honor 8 Pro is a new dual camera competitor in the market with 12MP+12MP, one of which is a monochrome lens. The design of the phone is quite premium and the build quality is amazing too. The Honor 8 Pro is priced at Rs. 29,999 for 6GB/128GB model. It comes in a nice blue matte finish at the back and glossy blue on the front panel. So, is this smartphone defines the price and is the dual camera makes it a worth buying smartphone? Let’s check out!
Design and Build
Huawei Honor 8 Pro has a very sturdy build quality and design, it got a really nice blue tint on the front panel around the display. The bezels are super glossy and give a much premium feel than most premium flagship smartphones. The front panel has a 5.7 inches display, the front camera above it and Honor branding below the display.
The back of the phone has a matte finish with dual camera setup at the top part with dual LED flash and below is the circular fingerprint sensor. The black antenna lines running across at the top and bottom part can also be seen on the back panel.
The top edge got the IR sensor and secondary microphone, the left edge has the SIM tray, and right edge got the power button and volume rocker. The bottom edge rocks the loudspeaker, 3.5 mm audio port, primary microphone, and USB Type-C port. Overall, the smartphone has a sturdy build and very sleek design, only it is a bit bulky because of its large 5.7 inches display.
Display
The display is 5.7 inches QHD IPS LCD panel with 515 PPI pixel density, it is further protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. The display is super sharp and playing games and videos is a great experience, the brightness and clarity of the Honor 8 Pro are above par.
Honor 8 Pro Display is made for VR Gaming!
Honor 8 Pro’s display is also best companion with sunlight when the brightness is maximum you can read books and do all the regular work easily. Watching videos and pictures in the sunlight is not a good experience on this display but every other thing looks good. The 2K display of Honor 8 Pro gives an immersive VR experience, a much better than what you’ll have in 1080p displays.
EMUI OS
Honor 8 Pro runs on Android 7.1 Nougat right out of the box, the OS is layered with EMUI 5.1 interface. You will get all the features of Android 7.1 Nougat except that you cannot use a custom launcher and quick settings are also not there. There are lots of themes you can download for the overall interface and even packs lots of gesture features which come in handy while using the smartphone.
Camera
The rear camera is a 12MP dual camera setup with dual-LED (dual tone), one of which is a monochrome lens to capture grayscale pictures. The aperture size of this camera is f/2.2 and comes with phase detection autofocus and laser autofocus. Capable of shooting 4K videos at 30 frames per second and Full HD at 60 frames per second. The front facing camera is an 8MP shooter with f/2.0 aperture size which plays well when comes to indoor selfies.
Honor 8 Pro made me wanted a dual-camera in my phone!
The camera of Honor 8 Pro comes with tons of features which can even imagine for like you’ll get pro mode, monochrome, HDR, light painting, night shot, 3D creator and pro video mode. The interface of the camera app is pretty much similar to what we see in most camera-centric smartphones.
The picture quality comes out good in daylight, both the monochrome and normal mode captures great details and colors. Honor 8 Pro dual camera setup actually helps in taking good images in low light conditions as well. Our sample clicks are the live example of the same!
Video mode is also good, it can capture up to 4K videos at 30 frames per second but while recording videos at this resolution, we experienced stutter even while capturing. Honor 8 Pro uses a compression technology to save videos in the mp4 format which reduce the size of the video, it also reduces the quality a bit.
Whereas Full-HD recording at 60 frames per second is smooth and the results are also very good. If you like to play with pro mode settings then Honor 8 Pro provides you with the pro video mode too. In this mode, you can adjust a lot of things in videos to make the results look better than videos recorded at automatic settings.
Performance
Honor 8 Pro packs quite a punch with the HiSilicon Kirin 960 processor, it is an octa-core processor with four cores running at 2.4 GHz and another four running at 1.8 GHz. The processor is further supported by the Mali-G71 MP8 graphics processor and 4GB/6GB RAM. The storage is 64GB which can further be extended to 256GB using SD card slot (second SIM slot).
The performance can be comparable to Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 only the load time is a bit slower in Honor 8 Pro which (not a big issue) could have been better using a better storage technology. The gaming is smooth for every racing game or first person shooter, it starts to lose that smoothness when it comes to multiplayer fps games. The benchmarks scores are listed in the pictures if you like to compare the performance in numbers.
Pros
- Premium design and build quality
- Decent camera performance
- Overall performance is amazing
- Pricing
- The 2K display
Cons
- UI needs more optimization
- Battery life is not as expected
Verdict – Should you buy Honor 8 Pro?
Honor 8 Pro is a worthy competitor to all those smartphones which comes with a dual camera setup and Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor. The dual camera gives the best result both in normal or in monochrome mode. If you are out there looking for a smartphone which comes with a dual camera and great performance, then the Honor 8 Pro is a must buy in Rs. 30,000 price range.
