Huawei has unveiled the Honor 8, the latest flagship smartphone in its Honor line-up of affordable handsets, but does it pack enough quality specs and features to warrant serious consideration as a OnePlus 3 and Huawei P9 alternative? Here’s what you need to know.
At a special launch event this evening, Huawei pulled the cloak on the Honor 8, which supplants the Honor 5X as the sub-brand’s flagship phone.
The Honor 8 is a 5.2-inch smartphone with a Full HD display that promises to combine “sleek” aluminium and glass design (exact dimensions weren’t available at time of publication) with an array of flagship-standard hardware features, headlined by a dual 12-megapixel rear camera configuration.
There’s also an 8-megapixel front snapper to play with, a fingerprint scanner that will allegedly unlock your phone in 0.4 seconds, and a new-gen USB Type-C charging port.
Under the hood, you get an octa-core Kirin 950 chipset comprised of four Cortex A72 CPUs (clocked at up to 2.3GHz) and four Cortex A53 CPUs (up to 1.8GHz) backed up by 4GB of RAM, according to the official UK spec sheet.
On-board storage will hum to the tune of 32GB (plus a microSD card slot), and there’s a sizeable 3,000mAh battery that supports the Smart Power 4.0 fast charging standard – Huawei claims you can juice the Honor 8 up to “almost 47%” in 30 minutes and that the device will last more than a day even when subjected to heavy usage.
Software comes in the form of Android 6.0 Marshmallow skinned with Huawei’s (largely infuriating) Emotion UI overlay.
It’ll be available in Pearl White, Midnight Black and Sapphire Blue – that’s white, black and blue in normal speak – with pricing set for £369.99 SIM-free and UK contracts available exclusively from Three for now.
Stay tuned for our hands-on with the Honor 8.
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Tempted by the Honor 8 or is there better on offer elsewhere? Let us know in the comments below.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
