Honor 8 Pro Review: This Is OnePlus 5’s Biggest Competitor

Honor 8 Pro has been launched in India with a price tag of Rs 29,999 and it will be an Amazon exclusive with the first Honor 8 Pro sale being scheduled on 10th July for Amazon Prime members. And that is it, if you want this smartphone to be your next companion, these are the details that you must have been looking for but as usual a smartphone with a huge reputation, when launched in India, often has a competitor waiting for it and in Honor 8 Pro’s case, it’s the recently launched OnePlus 5.

Indian smartphone market is a crowded one as there aren’t only a plethora of brands, but these brands have numerous products that travel across price brackets in the market. However, if you look at the Rs 30,000 price point, some series competition has been going on as this is the segment that is known to be a flagship killer, offering everything premium specs but at a low cost.

Honor 8 Pro also comes with similar traits but the segment itself has grown in the last couple of years which has led to the above mentioned stiff competition. At Rs 29,999, Honor 8 Pro will directly compete with the likes of Samsung Galaxy C7 Pro (Rs 25,990) and Moto Z2 Play (Rs 27,999) and the segment leader OnePlus 5, but will it prosper? Let’s see.

Honor 8 Pro Specifications

• 5.7-inch (1440 x 2560) QHD IPS LCD Multi-Touch display with 2.5D curved glass, Corning Gorilla Glass Scratch Resistant display, offering 515 ppi and 2K resolution.
• 2.4 GHz Octa-core Kirin 960 processor coupled with Mali G71 MP8 GPU
• 6GB LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB of internal storage, expandable up to 256GB via MicroSD.
• Android 7.0 Nougat with EMUI 5.1 on top.
• Dual 12MP camera at the rear with one shooter for monochrome and another which is an RGB lens. The camera comes with f/2.2 aperture, laser PDAF, LED flash and 4K video recording support.
• 8MP front shooter with f/2.0 aperture and a 77-degree wide-angle lens for group selfies and videos.
• Fingerprint scanner at the back
• 4000mAh battery with quick charge support, offering 504 hours of standby and 30 hours of talk time.
• IR blaster, 4G VoLTE, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth v4.2, USB Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack, and NFC.
• Honor 8 Pro comes with pre-installed Galaxy on Fire 3 and Jaunt VR apps.
• Honor 8 Pro’s retail box can be converted into a Google Cardboard viewer for VR experience.

What we like in Honor 8 Pro

• Solid build, sleek uni-metal body design

• The battery can give 50 hours of juice even with heavy usage

• While the Honor 8 Pro can’t match OnePlus 5’s SD 835, the Kirin 960 processor, Mali G71 MP8 GPU and 6GB of RAM can easily handle 20 apps at the same time, some of them being heavy games like Injustice 2 and Asphalt 8. There are unnoticeable lags and multitasking is like a walk in the park.

• The 5.7-inch display offers much more than the OnePlus 5 in terms of brightness, sunlight visibility and colors.

• Bokeh mode, HDR mode, as well as a nice monochrome mode, helps Honor 8 Pro helps the Honor 8 Pro sharper and richer photos both inside as well as in low lighting.

• The front camera is also a work of art and is the best unit ever seen in the segment, yes, even better than OnePlus 5, but only outdoors. In low lighting, the results will be same.

The ‘Bads’ About Honor 8 Pro

• Under low lighting, the smartphone struggles with noise and the pictures are sometimes grainy, a factor that Huawei-owned honor should work on.

• The smartphone doesn’t come with double coating at the rear. A minor ding and the device can lose some of its makeup.

• While there is nothing wrong with the customizable EMUI 5.1, stock Android fans not get the satisfaction they need.

• Honor 8 Pro comes with Quick Charge 3 support and considering the battery size, we would have loved the 5th generation support.

Verdict

While Honor 8 Pro completely dismantles Samsung Galaxy C7 Pro and Moto Z2 Play’s standings, when we take the sheer power of OnePlus 5 into consideration (the 6GB/64GB variant), specifications like SD 835 as well as Oxygen OS on top of Android Nougat might be missed in Honor 8 Pro.

However, at Rs 29,999, Honor 8 Pro is the best smartphone in the sub-Rs 30,000 segment and that is definitely a stand out feature of sorts. While you will get ‘more’ in OnePlus 5 but after 3000 bucks, Honor 8 Pro, on the other hand, will be giving the former, a taste of its own medicine with a better VFM tag.

It only comes down to the amount of money you are willing to spend because with either if the devices, you can’t go wrong!!