Honor 8 pro

The Honor 8 was one of the best-looking devices of 2016, and the Honor 8 Pro sure can take a shot at the crown once again.

Honor 8 Pro sports a seamless metal unibody design that looks and feels solid, as well as premium. The blue variant of course is my personal favorite, and quite a head-turner. The Honor 8 Pro isn’t the thinnest phone around, but with just 6.97 mm in thickness, it manages to pack in a 4000 mAh battery.

For a smartphone with a large 5.7-inch display, the thin borders and rounded edges aid the grip. No, one-handed usage is not ideal, as one would expect in a phone of this size, but the ergonomics are quite good and the weight distribution is on point. It doesn’t feel as heavy as the specifications sheet suggests (184 grams), but it’s heavy nevertheless.

At the back, the dual-camera sits flush with the surface and the fingerprint scanner too looks neat. The antenna lines on the Honor 8 Pro actually accentuate the design.

Unlike the glass panel of the of Honor 8, the Honor 8 Pro sports a matte finish that improves the grip and is visually pleasing. Of course, some people liked that glass body, but it was a fingerprint magnet and quite slippery. The latter would’ve become worse in a smartphone of this size and weight.

Overall, the Honor 8 Pro is a stylish device with a dependable chassis and stands out in the sea of similar looking smartphones in the market

DISPLAY

The Honor 8 Pro sports a 5.7-inch IPS display with 1440 x 2560 resolution. The Quad HD resolution and a pixel density of 515 ppi make for a terrific display. The display is sharp and the colors are vivid. The contrast ratio is top-notch as well, and while the display is a tad reflective, sunlight legibility is pretty good.

The display on the Honor 8 Pro offers a maximum brightness of 560 nits, which is brilliant. The black levels are deep and while there’s a blue tint on white, it’s not too noticeable to the naked eye.

The Honor 8 Pro has a 2.5D curved glass which offers a nice swiping experience across the large display. There’s Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection as well which will keep scratches at bay and prevent shatters to a certain extent.

The Quad HD IPS LCD panel on the Honor 8 Pro is one of the highlights of the device, but the obvious flip side to a higher resolution display is the bigger strain on the GPU and a hit on the battery life.

PERFORMANCE

Powered by Huawei’s top-of-the-line SoC, Kirin 960 with Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, the Honor 8 Pro packs in 6 GB of RAM. Developed by HiSilicon, Huawei’s in-house chipmaker, the Kirin 960 chipset is one of the most powerful smartphone chips out there and does well to take on the Exynos and Snapdragon ones in benchmark tests.

The Honor 8 Pro is a snappy performer that can handle aggressive multi-tasking as well as gaming without breaking a sweat. The generous RAM helps in fluid performance and there are literally no lags or stutters, as it sails through nicely as a daily driver. The device also does a good job at staying relatively cool even when stretched.

The Honor 8 Pro features a hybrid SIM slot, so you can either use two nano-SIMs or one SIM and one microSD card. A lot of multimedia hoarders who use two SIMs don’t usually like this arrangement, but the Honor 8 Pro packs in a generous 128 GB of internal storage and not many people would care for memory expansion anyway.

While the Honor 8 Pro sports a USB Type-C port at the bottom, yet oddly, the Type-C interface only supports the older USB 2.0 standard instead of USB 3.0 or 3.1. Most people though wouldn’t really care about it. Of course, OTG is supported.

The Honor 8 Pro has a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and it works quite well. Rarely did the sensor failed at authentication, and it works across 360 degrees – your fingerprint is recognized regardless of its position on the sensor

CAMERA

The rear camera on the Honor 8 Pro features a dual camera setup. There’s no Leica branding this time around, but Huawei was one of the first in the dual-camera game and has put out several devices with this feature already.

The dual camera setup boasts of one RGB sensor and another monochrome sensor – both 12-megapixel ones with f/2.2 aperture. And there’s a dual-tone LED flash. Both sensors work in unison to produce detailed photos with higher dynamic range. The RGB sensor processes all the color information while the monochrome sensor extracts the details from the shadows as well as highlights.

While the Honor 8 and Honor 8 Pro have identical camera setups, the shutter performance on the latter and the image processing is much better owing to the faster processor and all that extra RAM.

The Honor 8 Pro takes some great shots. The colors are beautiful without looking over-saturated. In daylight, the photos captured have a very good dynamic range with true-to-life color reproduction. The focusing too is pretty quick, except sometimes in close-up shots.

SOFTWARE

Out of the box, the Honor 8 Pro comes with Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.1 on top. Huawei’s proprietary layer – Emotion UI – has matured well from its previous generations and has comprehensive under-the-hood tinkering that boosts overall performance.