Honor 8 Pro Review- The Real Flagship Killer!

Huawei has announced the company’s latest flagship device under the Honor branding, the Honor 8 Pro. Honor 8 Pro will be replacing the brand’s flagship device, the Honor 8 in India. Honor 8 Pro packs a 5.7 inch Quad HD display and is powered by Kirin 960 Octa core processor with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It also comes with 12MP dual cameras, which is the 4th generation of dual cameras from Huawei. The phone packs 4000mAh battery which is rarely seen on a flagship device. It has EMUI 5.1 and Android 7.0. While Honor 8 Pro looks great in terms of specs, does it perform well?  Let’s find out in this detailed Honor 8 Pro review.

Design and Build:

Design wise, the Honor 8 Pro is one of the great looking flagships. While the Honor 8 was finished in the glass over the metal body, Huawei has gone for all metal body on Honor 8 Pro and the result is a sturdy and solid looking device. It comes in Black and Navy Blue colors and if you were to pick one, our suggestion would be Navy Blue. The build quality is superb and the brushed finish on the rear panel adds to the beauty of the phone. The rear panel has a matte finish and has the dual camera arranged pretty neatly and integrated well into the antenna lines making it feel like a design aspect. More importantly, there is no camera bump and it is flushed with the surface. Honor claims it as a feature and true to their claim it helps in handling the device and you don’t have to worry about camera lens cover getting scratched.

Below the camera is the fingerprint scanner, but unlike the Honor 8, there is no smart button on the scanner. The bottom panel has USB C type port, 3.5 mm headphone jack and the speaker unit. The top panel houses the IR blaster while the power and volume keys are on the right side. The left side houses the SIM tray. On the front panel, you can see the gorgeous 5.7 inch Quad HD display, 8MP front camera and the Honor logo at the bottom. The navigational keys are on screen.

The design is a tad bigger due to the 5.7-inch display and also 185gms, but Honor has made up for these with a slim chassis at 7mm. Overall, the Honor 8 Pro is an attractive and a solid device in the flagship segment.

Display:

Honor 8 Pro sports a 5.7 inch Quad HD display and it is an LTPS IPS LCD panel similar to Honor 8. It has a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels with 515 PPI pixel density. Unlike the Honor 8, the Honor 8 Pro comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display also features 2.5D curved glass. The display is sharp, vivid and has excellent colors. The viewing angles are great and so is the touch response. The sunlight legibility is also great.

Overall, the 5.7-inch display on the Honor 8 Pro is a treat to use, especially if you are a person who watches a lot of movies or plays games.

Software:

Honor 8 Pro runs on Android 7.0 with EMUI 5.1. We have already covered some of the best features of EMUI 5.0. The new UI feels more polished and they have combined the notification center and quick toggles into a single block. EMUI 4.0 had a layout with multiple home screen devoid of an app drawer. But with EMUI 5.0, the company is providing an option of enabling app drawer. By default, this feature is not enabled, but you can go to settings-> Home Screen style. The settings panel has also been redesigned to provide a better experience.

Since the navigational keys are on screen, you also get the option to customize the layout from the settings. With EMUI 5.1, you also get dual apps feature. With dual apps you can run two instances of an app, which means you can run two instances of social apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. EMUI 5.1 brings in this feature and it is called App Twin.

Since the phone has larger 5.7-inch display, you can reduce it with one handed mode. Other additional features include motion control, floating dock, voice control and also gloves mode. It also features the themes app. The software also comes bundled with some Huawei apps like Smart controller for controlling appliances via IR blaster, Health, Torch, sound recorder etc.

Overall, with EMUI 5.1, it feels a lot smoother and refined experience.

Performance:

Under the hood, the Honor 8 Pro is powered by the in-house HiSilicon Kirin 960 Octa-core chipset which has a quad-core Cortex-A73 clocked at 2.4GHz and another quad-core with Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. It is also one of the first chipsets to use A73 which is more efficient. It is coupled with 6GB of RAM and Mali-G71MP8 GPU which is again an improvement over Honor 8. The Kirin 960 shines in performance and is still one of the power chipsets available. In day to day asks, the Honor 8 Pro handled all tasks with ease and there wasn’t a sign of any lag or hiccups. The gaming performance of the device was also great with Quad HD display and bigger 5.7 inch panel. There was also no major heating issues while using device or gaming.

Honor 8 Pro with Kirin 960 offers the same performance that of any flagship like Galaxy S8 and in app performance test running in the background, it even beat S8 with 6GB of RAM.

The device comes with dual SIM cards, VoLTE and 4G LTE support with hybrid SD card. The phone offers 128GB storage in India and you get around 112GB out of the box which is impressive. The call quality of the device is very good and we did not face any issues. The speaker performance was also very good and the clarity was impressive.

The fingerprint scanner located on the rear panel is also very quick to unlock the phone and with EMUI you can also use the fingerprint scanner fo a lot of other functions like taking photos, scrolling through gallery etc.

The box packing of Honor 8 Pro also comes with a set of VR glasses and you can assemble the cardboard inside the box to form a Google Cardboard-style headset for VR experience.

Camera:

The Honor 8 Pro comes with the dual camera set up like the Honor 8. The company claims this is the 4th iteration of dual cameras and they have pioneered it well. While there is no Leica branding on this camera, the two cameras are 12MP sensors, one is monochrome while the second one is RGB. There is also a dual-LED flash and an 8MP front camera for selfies. The camera interface of the device is very good and offers a plethora of options to choose from.

The Honor 8 Pro comes with great camera experience especially with the modes and tools available. The wide aperture mode is one of the important features to look for and you can even take videos in wide aperture mode. There is also a new 3D Creator feature which is more of a fun aspect. You can also shoot images in monochrome mode.

Looking at the images taken in daylight, the photos turned out to be really good in terms of color quality, sharpness, and overall clarity. The HDR was also impressive. There is a great amount of detailing in the photos and noise is non-existent. The Bokeh mode is something which Huawei has mastered and looks great and with wide aperture you can play with the focus even after the image has been taken.

The low light experience of the camera is also impressive. There is also a Night Shot mode which you can use with a tripod and the results are very good. The noise levels are kept low and the overall quality of the low light images seems to be very good. Even with low light images, the detailing is good. Even without OIS (one of the features missing on Honor 8 Pro), the camera managed to take some good images in low light.

The phone supports video recording at 1080 at 60FPS and also 4K recording. The samples taken with the device is also pretty good. The lack of OIS shows up to an extent in the videos especially when walking. The front facing camera is an 8MP shooter with screen flash included. It can take some good selfies with details and there is also the beauty mode which at times makes the images a bit too sharp and tones are more or less whitened.

Overall, the camera on the Honor 8 Pro is one of the best we have seen. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Battery Life:

Honor 8 Pro comes with a massive 4000mAh battery with 9V 2A fast charging. This is also the first Honor device in India to come with fast charging. While most of the flagship devices have 3000 or 3500mAh capacities, Honor has managed to pack a 4000mAh capacity in such a slim chassis. The battery performance of the device is very good and can easily last more than a day with moderate usage. We tested the battery performance of the device and got almost close to 6 hours of SoT and with more than a day of battery life which is impressive for a flagship device with high-end hardware.

Verdict:

Honor 8 Pro, priced at Rs 29,999 is one of those devices which ticks all the right boxes for a true flagship experience at a more affordable price segment. With a great looking design and build, superb Quad HD display, refined EMUI, good cameras and great battery life coupled with superior performance, there is hardly anything to complain in the Honor 8 Pro. If we were to nitpick the cons, then it would be a lack of IP certification and a slightly heavier device to use.

But if you are really looking for a flagship experience which is light on the pocket, then the Honor 8 Pro is an excellent device to buy and it offers 128GB of storage in this price segment. We recommend this device for anyone looking for an affordable flagship experience.