Honor 8 Pro

One look at the spec sheet above – and you’ll know that the Honor 8 Pro is as loaded as it can get. From its 2K display to dual cameras, powerful hardware to the beefy 4,000mAh battery, the handset is quite well-equipped. What makes it a potent killer of the flagship killer is the fact that it’s priced marginally lower than the OnePlus 5. But specs and pricing are just one side of the story, and the real question is whether the Honor 8 Pro can impress us in real life. The short answer is yes, for the most part. And now we’ll expound upon that…

With a large 5.7-inch display, the Honor 8 Pro fall squarely in the phablet category. Even then, you can hold the smartphone with a single hand. Thanks to the slim bezels on the sides, it’s not too wide, though it does have considerable space above and below the display. While the top portion does have some elements such as an earpiece, a couple of sensors and a front-facing camera, there’s only Honor branding at the bottom, which seems a waste of space. This means you can reach the corners of the screen single-handedly, but for most operations such as typing, you’d need to use both hands.

While dual cameras might seem to be in vogue this year, if there’s one company which has been at the forefront of this trend – it’s Huawei and its sub-brand Honor. The company actually launched its first dual-camera smartphone in 2014 in the form of the Honor 6 Plus (camera review), with the device making its way to India in March 2015. Since then, it has launched quite a few offerings, with the Honor 8 Pro marking its fourth-generation dual-camera system. It comprises two 12-megapixel shooters, with the primary one capturing colours (RGB), and the secondary sensor capturing the scene in monochrome (black and white). The camera software then combines them to offer an image with better colours and contrast levels. The pair of snappers also work in tandem to offer a wide aperture mode, which lets you get some impressive bokeh results, with the subject in focus and the background being blurred. What sets it apart from other smartphones offering the depth-of-field effect is the fact that you can set the aperture between f/0.95 and all the way up to f/16 – ensuring that the images don’t look too artificial. The phone also comes with PDAF technology to lock the focus on the subject quickly.

For years, Honor has used its parent company’s in-house processors in its smartphones, and the Honor 8 Pro continues in the same vein. It’s equipped with the latest from the HiSilicon family – the Kirin 960, which is an octa-core processor built on the 16nm fabrication process. Following the big.Little architecture, it features two quad-core clusters running at 2.4GHz and 1.9GHz, which work as per the task at hand to keep a balance between performance and battery efficiency. Being a flagship, it’s as powerful as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, and while it might not have similar benchmark results, its real-life performance is buttery smooth. Thanks to the powerful chip and 6 gigs of RAM, there was nary an instance of lag during our usage. Even with multiple apps opened, the phone usually has around 2GB RAM free, and switching between them is instantaneous.

This is one aspect which reinforces our belief that specs don’t tell the full story. Even with a beefy battery, the Honor 8 Pro’s Achilles Heel is its battery life. With usage that involved GPS navigation for around an hour, streaming music via Wynk Music, 15 to 20 minutes of calls, cellular data being enabled the whole time and light gaming, it barely managed to last a full day of usage. If you push it though, then it will give up much sooner. Our battery test is a testament to the same, as the phablet was able to play a 720p video on loop for less than 11 hours, which is average.