Huawei Honor 8 Pro: characteristics, price, photos and reviews of Honor 8 Pro

Appearance and ease of use

If we talk about continuity in appearance, then Huawei Honor 6 is completely different from its brothers from the Honor family. The new device in this series of affordable smartphones is closest in appearance to its distant relatives from the more expensive line of top-end Huawei Ascend devices (P7, for example).

What makes them similar is not only the presence of a glass coating on the front and back surfaces, but also a metallized wide rim that encircles the body along the side perimeter, with the exception of the lower end. As is customary with Huawei smartphones, this rim does not continue at the bottom, but ends with a regular plastic sealed curve at the bottom end.

True, this time the rounding of the lower end is not too noticeable, and due to the overall considerable thickness of the case, it is “smoothed out” even more. And yet, design features similar to the flagship are clearly visible — with the only exception that the bezel here, unlike the Ascend P7, is not metal, but plastic, painted to look like metal.

In general, the devices of the Honor line have always been quite simple in design, the beauty of appearance was not a determining factor for them — it was more important to preserve the combination of good technical characteristics and not too high a price, which, in fact, provided the line Honor has so many fans.

Huawei Honor 6 looks just great, and due to its thicker and wider body, it is even more similar to the Apple iPhone 4 series than to the thin and elongated flagship brethren in the Huawei line. The wide metallic bezel and two glass panels covering both sides of the smartphone also give it a resemblance to an Apple product.

If you look into the transparent depth of the back wall, you can even see a barely noticeable symmetrical internal laser pattern under the glass, playing with iridescence in the sunlight. We call this material “glass” only for its external similarity: the creators themselves claim that an unusual composite material is used here, which has as many as 6 special layers that give depth to the appearance.

The front part of Huawei Honor 6 is completely covered with Gorilla Glass 3, which is scratch-resistant. The screen in this case occupies the maximum possible area of ​​the front panel: the side frames here are quite narrow (2.86 mm), the ratio of the screen area to the entire front surface, according to the calculations of the developers themselves, is 75.7%.

Above the screen, a black-painted speaker grille is embedded in the protective glass; the eyes of the front camera and sensors are visible nearby. Nearby there is such a useful element as an LED indicator — it notifies in different colors about the charging status and incoming events.

Below the screen on the front panel there is no usual row of touch-sensitive hardware control buttons — they are on-screen here and take up part of the working area, but they can always be removed and called back using a swipe gesture. However, in the settings you can make it so that the buttons do not disappear from the screen at all — as you like.

The rear panel traditionally houses the main camera module with a round window framed by a metal rim, as well as an LED flash eye that can work as a flashlight using a preinstalled program. The camera module is flush with the surface, and the flash consists of two sections, both LEDs have the same color.

Even lower, there is a slot cut for sound output from the main speaker, covered with a black-painted grille. There are no protrusions here, so the sound is significantly muffled when the smartphone is lying on a hard surface with the screen facing up.

It is impossible to remove the back cover here; the smartphone has a non-separable body, and all cards are traditionally inserted into the side slots. The device supports working not only with two SIM cards (Micro-SIM format), but also with a microSD memory card, so under the cover on the side of the Huawei Honor 6 you can find three slots at once.

Despite the fact that the card slots are covered from the outside with a cover, it serves only for camouflage — the smartphone is not protected from water and dirt. Accordingly, both standard universal connectors, Micro-USB and 3.5 mm headphone audio output, are not covered with any covers. They are located in their usual places — the lower and upper ends of the device, respectively.

It is worth noting that at the top end, in addition to the audio output, there is also a peephole for an infrared transmitter, which serves to emulate a remote control and communicate with various electronic equipment. Here you can see the hole of the second, auxiliary microphone, which serves for noise reduction.

The remaining elements are traditionally located along the side perimeter of the body. Both keys — volume and lock — are on the same right side, next to each other. The keys are metallized, quite large and can be easily felt blindly. The key travel is distinct and soft; in general, there are no complaints about the mechanical controls of Huawei Honor 6.

Design

Even in press materials, the developers talked about an impressive 4000 mAh battery in a thin body, but in reality it is even more impressive. The body is made of light metal alloy, all color options are matte. This review is about a blue smartphone. The screen size is 5.7 inches, the device weighs 184 g. It is lighter and more compact compared to the iPhone 7 Plus with a screen size of 5.5 inches, which also has a dual camera on the back.

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honor 8 pro specifications

Honor 8 Pro is still a fairly massive smartphone, especially when compared with the modern Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6, where the screen occupies most of the body and the frames at the top and bottom are minimal. For this reason, Huawei Honor 8 Pro is not very comfortable to hold, especially with one hand, especially not with the largest hand.

Luckily, the smartphone has software tricks that reduce the size of the interface for easier finger access, with a fingerprint scanner located on the back just under your index finger. The same scanner works as a touchpad, through it you can control the notification panel so that you do not need to use two hands to do this.

Along the edges of the case there is a volume control and a power button on the right, quite thin, but at the same time they are easy to press without looking and they have a good tactile response. There is a USB Type C connector for charging and data transfer at the bottom, and at the top there is an infrared sensor that is rare these days for controlling consumer electronics and TVs.

Huawei honor 8c review: hardware, performance

The first among smartphones to get the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor (14 nm) was the Honor 8Cе. The main core of this mobile platform is two quartets of 64-bit cores Kryo 250 Gold (high-performance) and Kryo 250 Silver (energy-efficient), operating at clock speeds up to 1.8 GHz. Graphics processing is provided by the Adreno 506 accelerator (OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan).

In addition to the Hexagon 546 coprocessor, the new platform is equipped with an X9 LTE ​​modem (Cat.7/Cat.13) and supports Full HD displays, as well as dual cameras with 13-megapixel sensors (or one 21-megapixel MP). In addition, the asset includes Wi-Fi 802.11 ac/b/g/n, Bluetooth 5.0, USB 3.1, NFC, Quick Charge 3.0, etc.

Testing Huawei Honor 8C. AnTuTu benchmark results

Testing Huawei Honor 8C. Results in the GeekBench benchmark

Testing Huawei Honor 8C. Results in the 3DMark benchmark

The new smartphone has only 32 GB of internal memory. To expand this storage, it is recommended to use a microSD/HC/XC memory card with a maximum capacity of up to 256 GB. Moreover, even in this case, you will not have to sacrifice the installation of a second SIM card (nanoSIM format), since the tray has three installation spaces, one of which is specially reserved for microSD. In addition, you can also temporarily expand the available storage, thanks to support for USB-OTG technology, by connecting a USB flash drive.

Two nanoSIM cards (4FF format) operate with one radio channel in DSDS (Dual SIM Dual Standby) mode. Among the FDD-LTE frequency ranges there is a “Russian troika” — b3 (1,800 MHz), b7 (2,600 MHz) and b20 (800 MHz). The wireless communications suite also includes 802.11 b/g/n (2.4 GHz) Wi-Fi module

GPS, GLONASS and BDS satellite systems are used to determine the exact location and navigation. The A-GPS mode provides assistance in coordination over cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Memory, CPU and performance

Honor 8S RAM speed is extremely budget-friendly.

Honor 8A Pro RAM speed is 4200 MB/s, budget-friendly, for 14,000 rubles you could get memory in the region of 7000 MB/s.

The speed of the built-in memory of Honor 8S is 250/130 MB/s, not bad!

The speed of the built-in memory of Honor 8A Pro is 196/100 MB/s, normal.

Surprisingly, the budget smartphone outperformed the more expensive one, and by a decent amount.

The MediaTek Helio A22 MT6761 processor was introduced last year. Quite an interesting chipset, considering the 12 nm process technology – low heating, high energy efficiency. There are 4 cores working inside with a clock frequency of up to 2000 MHz.

Towards the end of 2020, MediaTek Helio P35, aka MTK6765, was shown. Again 12 nm, but already 8 cores with a clock frequency of up to 2300 MHz.

In real life, Honor 8A Pro behaves better: less lags and slowdowns, more stable operation of all services and predictable behavior of the phone as a whole.

The Antutu test on Honor 8S failed and showed no results. The Honor 8A Pro ran the benchmark for about 15 minutes and produced 77,000 points — this is very low for an 8-core phone. Everything is fine with games on the first device, but PUBG will slow down even at the minimum settings. It is quite possible to play on a second smartphone even at medium settings of the PUBG game.

Total: Honor 8S is slow and clearly not for games, Honor 8A Pro is faster, but games are not very good either. One way or another, the older model comes out ahead in terms of overall performance.

Both smartphones operate on the Google Android operating system version 9. We did a similar review:

Detailed review of MIUI 9.0

Android P review

Positioning

I never cease to be amazed by Huawei, which one after another releases smartphones both for itself and for the Honor brand. I see the following situation: a potential consumer thought about buying a specific model for a couple of months, read dozens of reviews on the Internet to virtual holes and still decided to buy some Honor 9 Lite, and then — bam!

The Honor 8C was announced just the other day and arrived for review quite quickly. The positioning of this model is complicated. On the one hand, Honor 8C is more expensive than 7C (11,000 rubles), and on the other hand, it is cheaper than 9 Lite (14,000 rubles). That is, for those who have exactly 13,000 rubles in their pockets, it seems like they don’t want to reduce the price, but there is no point in overpaying.

The device is already available for purchase, price – 12,990 rubles. And if you buy the 8C on the official website, they still give you Honor Sport wireless headphones as a gift. By themselves they cost 2,990 rubles.

Productivity

The hardware platform of Huawei Honor 6 is based on the latest single-chip system (SoC) of Huawei’s own production — HiSilicon Kirin 920, which is almost identical in characteristics to the Kirin 925, announced later this fall and installed in the Huawei Ascend Mate 7, and differs from It is only due to the lack of an additional processor responsible for the operation of sensors and a fingerprint scanner.

The modern high-performance Mali-T628 MP4 video accelerator is responsible for graphics processing in the SoC. The smartphone’s RAM capacity is as much as 3 GB, which is currently the maximum amount of RAM built into modern smartphones. For the user’s needs, the device has about 11.5 GB of flash memory out of 16 nominal.

To get an idea of ​​the platform performance of the smartphone under test, we will conduct a standard set of tests.

For convenience, we have summarized all the results we obtained when testing the smartphone in the latest versions of popular benchmarks. The table usually adds several other devices from different segments, also tested on similar latest versions of benchmarks (this is done only for a visual assessment of the obtained dry figures).

Testing in MobileXPRT, as well as in the latest versions of AnTuTu and GeekBench 3:

According to testing results, Huawei’s own HiSilicon Kirin 920 hardware platform showed the highest performance results, even when compared with modern top-end platforms from market leaders. It completely smashed the eight-core MediaTek MT6592 platform, coming very close to the performance of the most powerful SoC Qualcomm Snapdragon 800/801 to date.

As for the results in the popular AnTuTu test, the smartphone shows very decent numbers in it, but it’s worth considering that we are now using the new, fifth version of the popular benchmark for tests, and all previous models were tested in the fourth version, and it is not yet entirely clear how the results of the two versions of the test correlate with each other.

Testing the graphics subsystem in the 3DMark cross-platform test:

Testing the graphics subsystem in the Epic Citadel gaming test, as well as Basemark X and Bonsai Benchmark:

Browser cross-platform tests:

As for benchmarks for assessing the speed of the javascript engine, it is always worth making allowance for the fact that their results significantly depend on the browser in which they are launched, so the comparison can only be truly correct on the same OS and browsers, and such the opportunity is not always available during testing. For Android OS, we always try to use Google Chrome.