Review of the Honor 8X smartphone: the best “mid-range”? / Smartphones
АвторЛян ЛиНа чтение 13 минОпубликовано
⇡#design and ergonomics
Honor 8X is a representative of the class of mid-price smartphones, with a bias towards the budget side: the device costs less than 20,000 rubles. And it is beyond this point that manufacturers usually begin to cut corners, and first of all, all designer delights go under the knife. Surprisingly, the hero of today’s review successfully passed this sad fate. The smartphone looks very attractive, not inferior in appearance to the 2-3 times more expensive Huawei P20 and P20 Pro.
Actually, the design concept here is exactly the same. The base of the gadget is metal, on the back there is glass with a texture underneath that shimmers beautifully in the light, and on the front there is a rather compact “unibrow”. There are no physical buttons on the front panel; the display occupies maximum of its area. Almost 85%, by the way, which is quite good for this price category.
Honor 8X, left side: power and volume buttons
This is the corporate style of Huawei and its sub-brand Honor. You can approach it in different ways: I know people who are not delighted with all this, but personally I like it: positive, bright, but not too pretentious. There are three color options — red, blue, and black for lovers of strict classics. The second option, for my personal taste, is optimal.
I didn’t have to get used to the ergonomics of the Honor 8X after my personal Samsung Galaxy S8 — the sizes of the cases are almost the same. But objectively, a gadget with a 6.5-inch screen diagonal is, of course, a shovel. If before this you had any 5.5- or 5.2-inch smartphone, then new experiences are guaranteed.
However, you shouldn’t be afraid of them — you’ll get used to it quickly. Moreover, the matte frame does not slip in the hand, the glass of the rear panel also does not slip out of the palm, and the developers conveniently placed the volume and power buttons on the right side, exactly in the place where the thumb rests. If you hold the device with your left hand, then your index and middle fingers touch these buttons. In theory, lefties can also be comfortable, but I’m not an expert in this regard.
Honor 8X, right side: sliding tray for SIM cards and memory cards
The glass on the back panel, of course, is very quickly covered with fingerprints, although on the Honor 8X in red this is not particularly noticeable. By the way, glass is quite easy to scratch, so it is better to handle the gadget carefully. The fingerprint scanner works quickly and accurately — during the entire testing period there were no questions about it.
The only thing that looks dubious is the solution with two camera lenses protruding very noticeably beyond the body. They always cling to your jeans pocket or scratch on the table when you put your smartphone on it without a case. Well, they collect all sorts of dust particles and other small debris.
Honor 8X, top edge: microphone
Honor 8X, bottom edge: speaker grille, microphone, microUSB, headphone jack
Display, sound and software
As mentioned a little earlier, the Honor 8X display diagonal is 6.5 inches. It is built on a widescreen IPS matrix with a resolution of 2340 × 1080 pixels. The extra 420 pixels in height come from the on-screen buttons and the notch border at the top of the screen. The aspect ratio is 19.5:9, and the pixel density reaches almost 400 pixels per inch.
From a subjective point of view, this is a very high quality screen. It has an average brightness reserve (427 cd/m2), but if you turn it up to maximum, the device is absolutely comfortable to use outdoors. The minimum brightness level is also worthy of special praise – it’s comfortable to read e-books in the dark at night.
Keep in mind that the Honor 8X display comes with a protective film attached at the factory. There is an oleophobic coating on it, but its quality is… a B with a big minus. Plus, the material from which the film is made is not very durable — already on the second day of testing, out of nowhere, a deep, long scratch appeared on it exactly under the “unibrow”.
Honor 8X, bright mode, gamma. Yellow line – Honor 8X performance, dotted line – reference range
Honor 8X, bright mode, color temperature. Blue line – Honor 8X performance, dotted line – reference temperature
Honor 8X, bright mode, color gamut. Gray triangle – sRGB coverage, white triangle – Honor 8X coverage
There are two color presets in the Honor 8X, as in all Huawei smartphones of the current year – “bright” and “normal”. By default, the smartphone operates in bright mode, which implies a color space slightly wider than sRGB, a gamma of around 2.17 and an increased color temperature (8,000 K on average with peaks up to 9,000 K).
Honor 8X, normal mode, gamma. Yellow line – Honor 8X performance, dotted line – reference gamma
Honor 8X, normal mode, color temperature. Blue line – Honor 8X performance, dotted line – reference temperature
Honor 8X, normal mode, color gamut. Gray triangle – sRGB coverage, white triangle – Honor 8X coverage
But if you change the mode to normal, the colors will be closer to normal: the gamma is 2.27, the temperature tends to 6500 K, and the curve almost does not jump, and the average deviation DeltaE on the Color Checker scale is 2, 90, which already fits within the normal range. It should be admitted that the Honor 8X display is configured very well — by smartphone standards.
Honor 8X runs Android 8.1 operating system with EMUI 8.2. The Huawei branded shell, like the design of a smartphone, can also be treated differently. But it has one unconditional advantage: the presence of quite a large number of additional settings in the menu. There is quite flexible color adjustment, the ability to hide bangs, switching between HD and Full HD, a convenient phone manager, and the ability to select sound presets for various headphones.
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Honor 8X itself, however, does not at all pretend to be a phone for lovers of high-quality audio. Yes, there is a headphone jack and aptX support, but without aptX HD. And even the Bluetooth version is only 4.2, not 5.0. Well, there’s no talk about a separate audio chip. However, is it fair to blame a smartphone that costs less than 20,000 rubles for lacking all this? In our opinion, no.
But there is face unlocking of the smartphone. Without any fancy sensors or infrared illumination, of course, just the front camera. It works quickly and quite accurately, but the latter is only true if there is enough light. The darker it is around, the more difficult it is for the front camera to recognize the user’s face. In general, it’s convenient, but there are quite a few questions about the safety of this approach.
Hardware, Performance and Wireless Communications
Inside the Honor 8X is installed Huawei’s proprietary chipset – HiSilicon Kirin 710. It is eight-core: four Cortex A73 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.2 GHz plus the same number of Cortex A53 cores with a frequency of 1.7 GHz. Mali-G51 MP4 graphics with a frequency of 650 MHz are also integrated here. Based on the specifications, it is not difficult to guess that this chip is a direct competitor to the Snapdragon 636 from Qualcomm.
There is no talk of any complaints about the performance of the system and the behavior of the smartphone while surfing the web, watching videos, working with documents, mail or communicating in instant messengers. The available 4 GB of RAM is absolutely enough for normal multitasking.
In games, the device also does not lose face: absolutely all top mobile projects can be played at least on medium graphics settings. At the same time, the phone does not heat up like an iron, but only becomes slightly warm. There is certainly throttling: in the corresponding test, 15 minutes after it started, performance dropped by 19% from the stated maximum. The loss is noticeable, but not so critical — we’ve seen worse.
There is a lot of built-in memory: 128 GB inside the smartphone for less than 20,000 rubles — that’s really cool. By the way, not even all flagships can boast of this. Well, even 64 GB in the younger version of the Honor 8X for 18 thousand looks great. And this despite the fact that the developers did not skimp on a separate slot for a microSD card. So you can enjoy all the joys of life with two SIMs, and expand the memory if you ever need it.
Communication quality is fine: LTE, although only Cat. 4, but in real life it is unlikely that you will be able to reach the maximum declared data transfer speed limit of 150 Mbit/s. Wi-Fi picks up signals in both bands and transmits and receives data very quickly.
Appearance and ease of use
Honor 8 Lite is a thin and sleek smartphone with a body made of two flat glass panels with a convex metal frame between them. From the outside, the device looks impressive, sparkling in the sun thanks to its panels with a “brushed steel” effect. This is glass with a metallized shiny backing, that is, almost a mirror, only slightly darkened.
Naturally, all fingerprints and any dirt will be visible on such surfaces, although, in fairness, it should be noted that a high-quality oleophobic coating does not allow fingerprints to appear quickly, and they are easily erased. The corner parts of the case are noticeably rounded in plan, the profile is very thin, which is why the device fits comfortably in any pocket.
The glass panels themselves can be quite slippery, but the smartphone is usually held by the sides, and here they have high-quality matte surfaces that do not slip at all in the hands. This issue is well thought out in Honor 8 Lite. There is also not the slightest complaint about the assembly, the body is monolithic, all the parts are clearly fitted, Huawei is in complete order with this.
The Honor 8 Lite version differs from the older Honor 8 and Honor 8 Pro by the absence of some elements. Here, for example, there is no dual camera, no two-section flash, no infrared transmitter on the top end. But for some reason, two rows of holes are cut in the bottom end, although there is only one speaker.
The top end contains only a 3.5 mm audio output for headphones and an additional microphone for the noise reduction system.
Cards are inserted into the side hybrid slot: either two Nano-SIMs, or one Nano-SIM plus one microSD memory card — everything is standard. Hot swapping of cards is supported.
Mechanical buttons are installed on the opposite, right side edge. The keys are large, protrude noticeably, are easy to feel, the action is a bit harsh, but the response is clear.
The entire front panel is covered with 2.5D glass with sloping edges. Above the screen are the usual sensors, a front camera peephole without its own flash, and an LED event indicator.
There are no hardware touch buttons under the screen; the buttons are only on the screen; their relative position in the navigation panel in Huawei smartphones can traditionally be changed at your discretion.
A camera module with a single flash is installed on the back side of the body; the same common glass back panel is used as protective glass for them, that is, the camera does not protrude beyond the surface. But the fingerprint scanner platform located just below is slightly recessed, making it easy to feel blindly.
Using the fingerprint sensor, you can not only unlock the screen, but also control calls, menu scrolling, alarm clock and camera shooting. There are no complaints about the scanner’s performance, recognition is quick and accurate, your finger can be placed at any angle, and up to five prints are recorded in the memory.
The manufacturer claims: “The advanced fingerprint recognition system allows you to unlock the Honor 8 Lite in just 0.3 seconds, uses a processor-level security system, and saved fingerprint patterns cannot be retrieved or restored.” In fact, the sensor really responds quickly, there are no complaints, but most modern fingerprint scanners have already reached the level where it has become difficult to single out just one based on its response speed.
Honor 8 Lite is available in four colors: black, white, gold and, of course, blue. Each of them has a front panel that matches the color of the case itself.
