Huawei Honor 8
Right on its self-imposed schedule,
Huawei has taken the wraps off the Honor 8 today. This is the new flagship from
the Chinese company's more affordable sub-brand, and it does come with a large
number of similarities compared to Huawei's top of the line device, the P9.
The Honor 8 has a 5.2-inch 1080p
touchscreen, and a dual-12 MP camera setup on the back, with f/2.2 aperture.
The selfie shooter is an 8 MP unit with f/2.4 aperture. The phone has up to 4 GB
of RAM and 64 GB of expandable storage. So far, on paper the Honor 8 is pretty
much identical to the P9.
The big difference is the chipset
employed. The cheaper Honor 8 has to make do with the older Kirin 950, whereas
the P9 sports the Kirin 955. The 950 inside the new Honor handset comes with an
octa-core CPU with four Cortex-A72 cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz, and four
Cortex-A53 cores that go up to 1.8 GHz.
4G LTE is built-in, along with dual-SIM
functionality (although the second SIM slot doubles as a microSD card slot so
you can't use two SIMs and an expansion card at the same time unfortunately).
The Honor 8 has a 3,000 mAh battery that you charge through a USB Type-C port.
The 3.5 mm headset jack is in too, and that's becoming more and more rare these
days.
The phone's dimensions are 145.5 x 71 x
7.45 mm, it weighs 153 gram, and it runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow underneath
Huawei's EMUI 4.1. A
fingerprint scanner is on the back.
The Honor 8 becomes available in China
on July 19 at 10:08 am. It will be offered in Pearl White,
Sunrise Gold, Midnight Black, Sakura Pink, and Sapphire Blue, though some
hardware versions won't be available in all colors.
The model with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of
storage is priced at CNY 1,999 (US$ 298, € 269). If you pick the one with 4 GB of
RAM and 32 GB of internal memory, the price is CNY 2,299 (US$ 343, € 310), while the
top of the line variation with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage will set you back
CNY 2,499 (US$ 373, € 337).
An international launch hasn't been
announced at this point, but expect to see the Honor 8 being offered through
Huawei's official online store in Europe in the coming weeks.
