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At the beginning of this year, though, Huawei finally started bringing phones to the US. Today we're looking at the value entry from Huawei's sub-brand, "Honor," called the "Honor 8." The Honor 8 occupies Ars' favorite $400 price point (£370 in the UK), which hits the (hopefully) perfect balance of high-end specs without all the often-gimmicky bells and whistles of $700 to $800 phones.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Huawei Honor 8 SCREEN 1920×1080 5.2" (423ppi) LCD OS Android 6.0 with EMUI 4.1 CPU Eight-core HiSilicon Kirin 950 (four 2.3GHz Cortex A72 cores and four 1.8 GHz Cortex A53s cores) RAM 4GB GPU Mali-T880 MP4 STORAGE 32GB plus a Micro SD slot NETWORKING 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC BANDS WCDMA: B1/B2/B4/B5/B8 GSM: 850/900/1800/1900MHz LTE FDD: B1/B2/B3/B4/B5/B7/B8/B12/B17/B20 PORTS USB 2.0 Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack CAMERA Dual 12MP rear camera, 8MP front camera SIZE 145.5 x 71 x 7.45 mm (5.73 x 2.8 x 0.29 in) WEIGHT 153 g (5.4 oz) BATTERY 3000mAh STARTING PRICE $399/£370 OTHER PERKS NFC, 9V/2A quick charging, fingerprint sensor, notification LED, IR blaster

Design and build quality

The Honor 8 can best be described as the Huawei P9's cheaper cousin. Huawei's more expensive phones, like the P9, get metal bodies, while the cheaper devices like the Honor 8 get glass backs with a metal frame. The Honor is basically built like a Samsung flagship, but for around half the price.

The glass back's "15-layer" construction catches light and shows different patterns depending on the angle. The downside is that any drop onto a hard surface will probably result in a shattered panel. The other problem is that a perfectly smooth glass back with no camera protrusion makes for a very low friction surface—once or twice the Honor 8 slowly slid off my desk over the course of a few hours.

On the back you'll find Huawei's usual rear fingerprint sensor, but this one doubles as a clickable button. Huawei calls this the "Smart Key," which has programmable actions for "press," "double press," and "press and hold." You can open an app, start the flashlight, or take a screenshot for each of the three actions.

Another oddity you'll find on the back: dual rear-facing cameras. The phone's 12MP color camera and 12MP monochrome camera supposedly combine to capture more light than a single lens.

The Honor 8 spec sheet contains something a little different: the phone uses one of Huawei's own SoCs, an eight-core HiSilicon Kirin 950. If you're going by CPU horsepower, the Kirin 950 is a high-end chip that can hang with the fastest Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple stuff out there. But the GPU and storage speed of the Honor 8 is weaker than we'd expect from a high-end device. The rest of the specs are in the high-end ballpark: 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (with an SD card slot), and a 3000mAh battery.

The phone's aluminum rim is rounded for a more comfortable hold, along with chamfers on both sides of the rim where the metal meets the glass. On the rim you'll find volume and power buttons on the right, headphone, speaker, and USB Type C ports on the bottom, a SIM/MicroSD slot on the left, and a mic and (surprise) an IR blaster on the top.

There isn't much to say about the outside. It feels solid. The fragile glass back is a bummer, but as far as glass phones go, this is made as well as anything else out there.

EMUI 4.1: Huawei's software feels like a copy of a copy











The Honor 8 runs Android 6.0—an old version of Android—with Huawei's "EMUI" skin on top. Huawei started EMUI in 2013, and it's more or less an exact copy of Xiaomi's "MIUI" interface, which itself is heavily influenced by iOS. You're getting a copy of a copy. Expect a full reskin to make the OS look less like Android and more like iOS.

The problem with these big Android reskins is that OEMs can't reskin the Google apps or the millions of third-party apps out there. This means you'll never have a consistent software experience—Google and most of the good third-party apps are following the Material Design guidelines, while the core OS and OEM apps are following whatever their design guidelines are, if such guidelines even exist. It's a mess.

The iOS influences abound: the Honor 8 has no app drawer because iOS doesn't have an app drawer. All the included apps have a colored square background instead of the unique silhouettes Google and third-parties use. The notification panel uses a frosted glass background, just like iOS. The recent app screen has been changed from vertical to horizontal scrolling, because that's how iOS works. The settings are a carbon copy of iOS, too. You're also missing some Android features. No notifications appear on the lock screen. Adoptable storage doesn't work. Direct Share is broken. Always-on voice commands are not supported. On the plus side, Android 6.0's permission system is present and working, as is the fingerprint API. User accounts survived Huawei's paint job, too.

The built-in apps, like the operating system, have their own interface design that is completely different from what you'd get from a normal Android app. Most handle navigation with iPhone-style bottom bars, along with an ever-present bottom-right "menu" button that hides a bunch of extra options. The whole package doesn't quite match Android or iOS, and, in general, it feels like something from another dimension.

We don't expect fantastic software support from Huawei. The Honor 8 is currently one major Android version behind (shipping 6.0 versus 7.0), and it's missing two monthly security updates (it's still on "July"). You won't get Google's security updates every month. Huawei recently stated it would provide software updates for its devices for 24 months after the initial launch, with "at least once every three months during the first 12 months." That sounds like the same "quarterly" monthly security update plan Motorola adopted. Also, like Motorola, we do not recommend a device that doesn't have timely monthly security updates.

Performance

The performance of the Honor 8 is going to be interesting. As I mentioned before, Huawei outfitted the Honor 8 with one of its own SoCs instead of the cookie-cutter Snapdragon 82. Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 950 is an eight-core chip containing four 2.3GHz Cortex A72s and four 1.8GHz A53s.

Given that the Snapdragon 820 is only a four-core chip, the Kirin 950 will usually beat the Snapdragon 850 in CPU benchmarks. In Geekbench 3's multi-core test, the Kirin 950 can even hold its own against the fastest SoCs out there, like the Samsung Exynos 8890 and Apple A10 Fusion.

While the CPU power is decent, Huawei skimped on the GPU. The Honor 8 packs an ARM Mali-T880, the same GPU as you'll find in an Exynos variant of a 2016 Samsung flagship. But where the Galaxy S7 has a Mali-T880 MP12—that's 12 GPU cores—the Honor 8 has a Mali-T880 MP4—only 4 GPU cores. So while it'll win in CPU benchmarks, the Honor 8 gets crushed in GPU benchmarks. The storage performance is not spectacular, either.

Of particular note is the $400 Honor 8's performance compared to our favorite $400 phone, the OnePlus 3. OnePlus didn't have any problems with the GPU or storage at the same price point. The Honor 8 just can't keep up.

















