Honor 8

The Honor 8 is a work of art. It's one of the most gorgeous phones we've seen this year, with a lightweight aluminium frame sandwiched between two layers of 2.5D curved glass. Our gold unit was a real stunner, but if we had to pick a favourite, it would be the Sapphire Blue. The mirror finish on the rear looks stunning, and the gold accents on the smartphone add several notches to its sex appeal. Unfortunately, both the front and rear don't come with any sort of protection, and tend to pick up scratches. They're also very prone to fingerprints and smudges, so you'd need to put a case on this phone, or be very careful with it. On the plus side, the Honor 8 isn't as slippery as other glass sandwich smartphones like the OnePlus X and ASUS ZenFone 3.

The Honor 8 features a 5.2-inch display with full HD resolution, making it plenty sharp at 423ppi. The 2.5D glass adds a lot to the design, but it tends to activate the display quite easily while holding the phone, which is a turn off. Colours, icons and text look crisp on the screen, and the contrast levels are good as well. We found that the auto-brightness was a bit glitchy, and often didn't crank up the brightness enough.

The Honor 8's mainstay is its cameras, and interestingly, it uses the same hardware found on the Huawei P9. So you get twin 12MP sensors with f/2.2 aperture. One of the sensors is RGB to capture colour, while the other is monochrome to capture light, detail and contrast. Like the P9, snapping a photo with the rear camera results in both snappers taking an image simultaneously and providing a composite result. The main difference between the Honor 8 and P9 cameras is that the former doesn't come with Leica branding, and as a result, you don't get Leica's film modes of Standard, Vivid and Smooth colours. But perhaps the biggest disappointment with the Honor 8's cameras is the lack of a dedicated monochrome mode to take advantage of the standalone sensor. The Huawei P9 managed some stunning black and white shots, and while you can achieve this while using one of the mono filters available in the Honor 8's camera app, it's not the same.

The Honor 8 is powered by Huawei's own Kirin 950 SoC, an octa-core chipset considering of two quad-core clusters clocked at 2.3GHz and 1.8GHz respectively. This is the same processor seen on the flagship Mate 8. It's paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The smartphone also features an always-on i5 co-processor, which collects the data from various sensors, and is responsible for step counting in the Health app and speech recognition for the voice controls. It's capable of performing tasks even when the smartphone is asleep, thereby reducing power consumption.