Review: Honor 8 Pro

The dual lens slick device is a must have phone

Honor have been producing some amazing devices of late with the Honor 8 and Honor 9 and for those that want something a little bit bigger with more battery life there is the Honor 8 Pro.

Design

The Honor 8 Pro has a 5.7" IPS LCD display with a 1440 x 2560 resolution (515 ppi pixel density). Anyone looking at this display remarks on the vibrant colours and deep blacks.

The all metal and glass affair is striking especially in our blue review unit. There are dual sim trays for those who need to keep the mistress and wife separate, or otherwise work/secret life or you can use one for a microSD. Onboard storage runs at 64GB but cards up to 256GB can also be used.

There is an IR blaster up top and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom chin which I would prefer at the top due to charging docks but that is personal choice.

Camera

The dual camera system on the Honor 8 Pro is probably the best I have seen thus far, and I include the Huawei line of phones also even with their Leica lens.

The Dual 12 MP sensors have f/2.2, phase detection and laser autofocus and dual-LED (dual tone) flash. In pretty much all situations the camera never let me down. There is no OIS on board so if you want to do any kind of fancy night shots then a tripod is in order.

The viewfinder, camera modes and Light Painting options

There are a host of camera modes including a full manual mode and some exceptional ‘Light Painting’ modes which includes the Star Track feature seen below.

Dept of field trickery is fantastic thanks to the dual lens

There also some other very cool night features such as Star Track which allows amazing images like these

Performance and Software

The Honor 8 Pro has an Octa-core (4x2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A53) with a Mali-G71 MP8 GPU. The chipset is Huawei’s own in-house HiSilicon Kirin 960 and for the most part this coupled with 6GB of RAM keep the device running smooth. I did however notice considerable slow down oddly with some apps, for example just opening Chrome could be quite choppy and often took about 2 seconds. Typing also at times would be delayed, you type, you wait but then eventually it would clear up.

Stock launcher with task switcher UI on right

The device is running Android Nougat and with the latest Emotion UI 5.1 much of the bloat is now gone and is more stock than before. Users who are not fond of not having an app drawer can now thankfully bring it back.

Overall I was very happy with what Honor has done with their take on Android, it’s now cleaner and smoother and more stock like which is what most people really want these days.

Battery Life

The battery on board is a 4,000mAh unit which is fantastic to see especially considering the Honor Pro 8 is very thin. Battery life is a real problem for most people and most people I talk to would rather a ticker phone with a big battery, every OEM out there, I am looking at you.

However despite the battery size, I found that while it lasted me an entire day, 7am to 11:30pm with about 5% left this varied from day to day even though my habits would not. Some days I would need to top up around dinner time, and I found that web browsing what the biggest issue, always is, however more so on the Honor 8 Pro. Thankfully fast charging is built in, it’s not quite as fast as OnePlus’s Dash Charge but quick none the less.

Overall though battery life is top notch.

Final Thoughts

The Honor 8 Pro is a serious consideration for people perhaps thinking of buying a device such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 which while also very good is plagued with bloatware and unnecessary skinning. With the Honor 8 Pro you are getting excellent software, a great camera setup and a large battery.

Even though my daily driver is a OnePlus 3T which is overall a little bit quicker and smoother I would swap easily over to the Honor 8 Pro in a second