Honor 7X Android Oreo Beta with EMUI 8.0 rolls out starting today, brings Project Treble compatibility

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When the Honor 7X was first announced for international markets, it gained a lot of attention for its value. At €299, the smartphone offers a 5.93″ 18:9 FHD+ display, a HiSilicon Kirin 659, 64GBs storage, and 4GBs RAM. In the U.S., you get a 32GBs storage and 3GB RAM variant for $199. You get a lot of bang for your buck with the 7X, but one source of disappointment was its software: It launched with Android 7.1 Nougat and EMUI 5.1. Now, however, those of you who signed up for the beta test will soon receive the official Android Oreo beta upgrade with EMUI 8.0.

Earlier this month, Honor announced a beta program for owners of the 7X in the United States, India, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France. Yesterday, the company started sending our e-mails to participants in the Friendly User Test (FUT—Honor’s beta program) telling them that the beta Oreo update with EMUI 8.0 would roll out starting today, with every user in the beta receiving the update by the end of the week. For those of you not in the beta test, Honor France says the update will roll out sometime in Q2 2018.

Here is the full text of the email:

Email sent to Honor 7X FUT Testers Hello FUT Testers, We’d like to thank everyone that has chosen to participate in our newest FUT trial for the Android O. The update will be releasing tomorrow March 15!

It will be a staged rollout through out the day and everyone should have the update before the end of the week. Here are the steps to take to see if the update is available:

1. Go to “Settings” and scroll to “System”

2. Select “System Update” and give it a few seconds run a quick scan

3. Hit “Check for Updates” option, if no update apears select top right menu option (looks like three dots) and hit “Download latest full package”

4. If successful please install update, if nothing shows up please wait a few hours before trying again Please use this email address to provide us details of any issues or new features you might run into or like. We are looking forward to hearing from you all. Thanks again for everyone that has participated in this release. We are looking forward to hearing all the feedback! Thank you,

Honor FUT Team!

The update brings plenty of new features on board to the device. Android Oreo brings notable enhancements such as picture-in-picture mode, support for an Autofill API, notification channels and snoozing, stricter background app limitations, and more. In addition, EMUI 8.0 adds new features such as a floating navigation dock and smarter notifications. Notably, the 7X previously received an update bringing Face Unlock and AR Lens to the device.

With Android Oreo on board, the device’s already great value will certainly be enhanced by the new software update. Several users on our forum report that the update is Project Treble certified, which is great news for enthusiasts of the device. This will open up custom ROM support as Project Treble compatibility means the 7X will be able to flash an AOSP Generic System Image (GSI) without needing any modifications to the kernel. One of the major advantages of the high-end Honor View 10, at least in our view, was Treble compatibility which has resulted in several AOSP-based ROMs being made available for it, so it’s nice the see that the popular Honor 7X may be able to get this same treatment in the near future.