Honor 8X preview: comeback is fine, but makes little impact

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The Honor 8X is an Android smartphone with a competitive price-quality ratio. Is this the return which the company is the Dutch market left to conquer?

Read our Honor 8X preview

Honor is from this month again active on the Dutch market. Maybe you missed it, or maybe you even never of Honor heard. It is a sub-brand of Huawei that a few years ago all smart phones sold in our country, but after limited success, quickly disappeared. Where Huawei is focused on each price range and each consumer, was hoping to Honor especially on the online market to break through with success among young people.

This time throws Honor the a slightly different approach. The company comes with smartphones like the Honor Play Honor 10, devices with a competitive price-quality ratio. They are still equipped with the same hardware as smartphones of its parent company, Huawei, but have prices that are a hundred euro or more lower. Honor is a brand for the budget-conscious consumer, and that leaves the new Honor 8X.

The Honor 8X is since recently available in the Netherlands, and we actually got him recently to try it out. For loyal Huawei fans will the device be known for: the hardware is very similar to the Huawei P Smart Plus and Degree 20 Lite. This Honor gives you, however, all for 250 euros in the home, soon 100 euro less than the price of that two. In addition, the 8X has a slightly larger screen (6.5 in place of 6.3 inch) and a larger battery.

The design is in any case not to see that the Honor 8X are relatively cheap. The front exists for more than ninety percent of the screen, with the top of the image only a narrow notch for the selfiecamera and speaker. The screen has a full hd resolution; more than enough for a sharp image. Also the colors and brightness are fine.

The back is made of plastic, but looks strong shine a lot fancier. The left side is a little matter, while the judge so much shine that you would give him almost as a mirror. It is a significant magnet for fingerprints, but Honor delivers happy free a transparent cover.

The back is also a finger print scanner. That we have but a very short test, but worked well. The scanners behind Huawei’s smartphones have so far never for difficulties, and we expect it to be here, too. At the bottom are a headphone jack (hooray!) as a micro-usb port. While most manufacturers now usb c choose, hold Honor yet a little longer on the older standard. Why is not clear.

In the field of hardware does Honor it’s a lot better. The Kirin 710-chip in the 8X is very smooth. Apps launch quickly and run smoothly. Also a big plus: there are variants with both 64 as 128GB of storage. In both cases, more than enough to keep all your apps, games, photos and music on lost to.

While the battery is still not have been able to test is the capacity of 3750 mAh is probably more than enough to make it a full day out. Unfortunately, it supports 8X then again no fast charging, which makes the multiple hours it takes for your empty battery full.

The importance of good hardware is not to be underestimated: not so long ago, cheap smartphones defective hardware. Even now is the hardware at some competitors just not good enough. The Honor 8X know, in any case, during our test period, however, to make an impression. He scores, maybe not as good as a twice as expensive top-class device in the benchmarks, but in daily use, the 8X is more than fast enough.

The Honor 8X is equipped with two cameras on the back. There is a primary lens 20 megapixel, supplemented with a secondary 2-megapixel which is used as a depth sensor. Thus, you can take photos with bokeh effect shoot. Objects in the foreground come in focus, while the background will be blurry layer. That works well, and continues to be a great effect.

Just like on Huawei smartphones will fit the 8X artificial intelligence with object recognition to photos to improve. You make for example a kattenfoto, then the unit is ready to move fast to capture. Also for night shots, documents, and more adjustments will be made.

I have the camera of the Honor 8X only recently able to test, but was not particularly impressed. The photos look nice on Instagram-sized, but once you zoom in to be soon, a few problems are visible. Poorly lit corners are full of noise, while the image with a bright source of light soon dominant white light. It’s all quite sharp, but in this price range some competitors have better cameras.

At the time of writing runs Honor 8X is still on Android Oreo, but the company assures us that an update to Android Pie will follow soon, ‘by the beginning of next year’. That, of course, is a nice promise, but competitors like the Nokia 7 Plus and Xiaomi Mi A2 are now of that update. For the fastest updates you should not be directly at Honor. The company guarantees to get an update to Android Q, and also says ‘regular’ updates.

The device runs on EMUI, the Android skin from all the Huawei smartphones. That’s why the menus and the homescreen look pretty different from the standard version of Android. We find it to be a little messy on the eye, but tastes may differ. By default, there is some bloatware on the 8X (among other things eBay, and six games from Gameloft), but you can happily remove all of them.

Conclusion Honor 8X preview

The Honor 8X has a decent camera, sleek design and seems to be a good battery to have. Especially the hardware is in a positive sense: this is an affordable smartphone that is in daily use to all needs.

Unfortunately, the competition in the price range of the Honor 8X murderous. For the same money you can buy your smartphones from all kinds of competitors with similar hardware. Xiaomi and Nokia are proliferating with rapid updates, Samsung puts in on screen quality, while Motorola bet big on cameras. The Honor 8X does all those things well, but never better than a competitor. Perhaps after a longer testing period, other aspects stand out. For now, the Honor 8X is an excellent choice in its price range, but not the best.

23 November 2018, 23:15 | Views: 162