Honor 8 Pro comes with an impressive processor, a good dual-camera, good battery power with fast-charging technology and is all confined within one of the slimmest smartphones ever
Honor 8 Pro priced under 30K may prove as Huawei’s knock out punch for OnePlus
Honor’s ‘best performing and highest qualified smartphone’ is trying to tackle the issues of fragmentation and lag – which has bothered Android users for a while now.
Honor launched the Honor 8 Pro on July 6thin India in two variants, Midnight Black and Navy Blue. The handset has been priced at Rs. 29,999 and is exclusively available on Amazon India. In keeping it within this range, they could bring serious competition to other players in the segment. However, in order for the Honor 8 Pro to gain the title of being the best ‘value for money’ smartphone, they need to do more than just ‘look’ competitive – they have to offer some serious innovation that is India-specific.
The Honor 8 Pro is a good looking phone and the full metal design makes it sturdier than its predecessor but heavier. The body is extremely smooth to touch and the use of a diamond cutting process using CNC for greater precision enables it to be one of the slimmest smartphones ever. This is despite the inclusion of a 4000 mAh Li-po battery, coupled with a fast-charging technology that charges your phone 100% in a short while.
The Smart Power 5.0 technology helps to maximise battery life by automatically identifying and terminating processes with exceptionally high power consumption, as well as minimizing power consumed by background applications. In the meantime, it also manages alerts to optimize power consumption when the phone is on standby.
Taking the performance of their dual-cameras forward, the Honor 8 Pro has done well in including the rear dual-cameras of 12 MP + 12 MP. It houses several modes, including one where you could create animated doodles, which may impact the image quality. Having said that, the camera gives good stability and depth for both – stills and videos. The hardware and software of the smartphone allows for 4K video recording and its coding allows for it to produce files twice as small as its predecessor.
Honor 8 Pro is a delight for gaming enthusiasts, Honor claims that the phone boasts of the highest levels of colour accuracy and detail. Along with its 2K display, it features a high resolution of 515ppi, 79% screen-to-body ratio, 16700K colors and 94.5% coverage of the NTSC color gamut. The handset automatically optimises the screen display and adapts the contrast level when watching videos to enhance the viewing experience. Given how many of us are now resorting to our mobile phone screens to consume videos, and sometimes whole movies, this is a smart move from Huawei’s smartphone e-brand, Honor.
The device comes with a cardboard viewer and an OTA update for the Jaunt VR app and users will also have access to the world of Galaxy on Fire 3, along with a customised Honor Spaceship and 3D gaming owing to the Vulkan 3D API.
Honor’s ‘best performing and highest qualified smartphone’ is trying to tackle the issues of fragmentation and lag – which has bothered Android users for a while now. Honor 8 Pro runs on the latest 16 NM Kirin 960 octa-core processor backed by 128GB ROM (that can be further expanded via micro SD card to 256GB). Opening applications on the handset is also quicker now since the CPU single- core and multi-core performance has also been improved by 10% and 18% respectively, according to the makers. Furthermore, the EMUI5.1 enables the general optimization of Android and minimizes stuttering issues.
The Honor 8 Pro is engineered in accordance with keeping the needs of today’s power users and gamers in mind. The single-core and dual-core performance has been improved with the all new Kirin 960 chipset featuring 8 processor cores – four high-performance Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four low-power Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz. The Vulkan graphics are supported by the Mali-G71 boosts the graphic performance. This should enable the phone to run games at high frame rates with little or no lag and dropped rates – even in 3D.
For smoother user experience, the new EMUI 5.1, was designed for Android Nougat, learns from the user’s behavior and habits. From now on, if you open a certain application at a certain time of the day, the system will keep track of this and load the app in anticipation of you opening it.
Expanding their focus beyond just the product has also launched 17 Exclusive Service Centers across India, exclusively as Huawei-Honor service centers. Other than handset repairs, replacements, hardware and software checks and updates, Huawei exclusive service centers will also provide appointment booking, free recycling of your waste mobile phones and other electronics products and special service for the selected model user (VIPServices). In addition to these they also have 250 authorised service centers. This has been done with the objective to strengthen their after sales services for their mobile handsets.
The Honor Pro 8 has been priced aggressively to make it a fierce competitor to the onePlus 5 but Honor will have to, through marketing and advertising, etc, push the brand aggressively as well. Since the phone comes with an impressive processor, a good dual-camera, good battery power with fast-charging technology and is all confined within one of the slimmest smartphones ever, it makes for a good option in the under 30K range.
