Huawei's Honor 8 is a great little budget flagship, but some are a bit worried that its software may keep it down. Indeed, the Marshmallow-toting handset's current version of Huawei's EMUI skin is pretty heavy, and those predicting that it could slow updates down a bit could be onto something, but owners actually won't have to wait all that long. Android Nougat officially hit the streets back in October, and Huawei Honor 8 owners can expect to see it hit their devices around February, a relatively passable four month turnaround time, just about. The kicker is that the Nougat upgrade will also bring a new version of EMUI, with a bit of a makeover and some new features, including an app drawer in the stock launcher.

The update will bring the Huawei Honor 8 up to about the same level of functionality as the EMUI 5.0 packing Huawei Mate 9, with all of the Nougaty goodness underneath that users have come to expect from Google's latest and greatest software. The update will bring the Android 7.0 version of Nougat, which will be missing some of the under the hood optimizations and tweaks that can be found in Android 7.1. EMUI 5.0, however, more than makes up for this by being a solid improvement in all departments on its predecessor.

One of the more interesting parts of the update is a curious and futuristic feature baked into Huawei's newest version of EMUI. The 5.0 update for Huawei's custom skin includes an underlying process based on machine learning that is made to learn a user's behavior and usage patterns over time, then tweak things under the hood to prioritize and optimize where it matters, giving performance where a particular user may want it most, while leaving other apps on the back burner to save space, RAM, and battery life. The Huawei Honor 8 is by no means a flagship device, but its specs are definitely on the powerful side of the budget market, just a hair above the average 2014 flagship; this means that such tweaks could make it into quite a beastly little device, with a decent amount of power saving thanks to the low-power processor. The update will be dropping at an unspecified time in February, and Huawei will likely put out more details in the meantime.