Huawei, no more an unknown entity in India now, has been steadily launching smartphones at regular intervals. Most of the handsets launched by the company so far in India have been able to garner a decent fan following. The latest device from Huawei’s kitty is the Honor 8 that was launched just earlier this week at Rs 29,999.
In this write-up, we present you our perspective of the device after using it for more than two weeks.
Design and build quality
Nowadays there is nothing much that separates smartphones in term of design. Almost all the phones look identical. Honor 8 also to an extent has followed the design philosophy which is in vogue but with subtle changes that stand out. 
First and foremost is the dual rear camera setup that thankfully doesn’t have a bump. The 2.5D screens on the back and front are slightly curved which make it edgeless and easy to hold. The smartphones, because of the gloss finish, looks shiny and premium.
The power on/off button, volume rocker and SIM tray are on the side panels. In the bottom, a 3.5 mm audio jack, Micro USB port and speaker are placed. In the top panel a noise cancellation microphone and an Infrared port are located. The side panel of the device is a metal frame with chamfered edges. In the back panel apart from the camera setup, there is a fingerprint sensor.
Since the back panel of the device is made of glass, it attracts a lot of smudges and is a bit slippery. We would thus suggest you buy a case for the device.
Overall, inspite of having a 5.2-inch display screen, Honor 8 looks compact and will fit in the palms of most of the Indian. It is one of the best-designed smartphones by Huawei so far and build quality will not disappoint you.
Display
The Honor 8 has a 5.2-inch Full HD (1080P) display. It is bright, crispy and has excellent colour reproduction. The viewing angles are good but in bright sunlight, readability is just decent. In outdoor locations, I felt an extra dash of the brightness of would have been great.
Performance and Software
The Honor 8 is based on Android 6.0 and has the latest EMUI user interface. It is powered by Kirin 950, a processor that is an in-house production of Huawei. The Chipset has Mali-T880 GPU. The phone packs in 4GB RAM and 32GB of internal storage. You can add up to 128 GB more through a micro SD card if you need it. 
The device gives a lag free performance and response to touch is quite smooth. Even playing graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 is smooth as butter. Also, during my usage the temperature of the device didn’t go up to uncomfortable levels.
The look and feel of the EMUI user interface have some resemblance with iOS UI. It doesn’t have an App drawer, nor is not laced with bloatware and is quite fluid. One can fine tune display colours, change themes, customise notification panel and assign different actions to fingerprint sensor.The EMUI is very well optimised for Honor 8.
On the software side my only concern is: will the company be able to push Android 7 update sooner? There is one other issue as well, as of now the device doesn’t support VoLTE. In simple terms, it will not support Jio SIM.
In terms of audio quality, I was happy with it during calls but for other purposes, the speakers’ output can only be termed as decent at best. The Honor 8 is a dual SIM device in which at a time you can use two nano-SIMS or one nano SIM and a micro SD card. In Honor 8, apart from the usual connectivity options, one will get NFC and infra-red.
Honor 8 comes with a 3000 mAh battery, which when fully charged will be able to heavy multitasking for about 12 hours and with moderate usage, one can extract around 16 hours of back up.
Camera
This is what Huawei has been claiming to be a stand out feature in Honor 8. The Honor 8 has a dual 12-megapixel camera unit in the rear that features a large 1.25 um pixels and f/2.2 aperture. One is capable of only taking snaps in black & white while the other adds colour. The final image is thus the combination of the output of both the cameras. Due to the innovative technology, the rear cameras offer in-depth detailing and are able to take snaps in low light as well.
As expected, in suitable lighting, Honor 8 managed to capture some amazing pictures. The cameras are also quite fast to focus; most likely you will never miss a shot because of it. This is due to a hybrid Autofocus system that combines laser autofocus and the standard contrast-based autofocus detection system. The colours reproduction of snaps is slightly on the warmer side but the quality will not disappoint.
Its 8-megapixel front camera has f/2.4 Aperture and it managed to capture a lot of detailing even in moderate lighting. To further enhance the picture quality, beautify mode can be used.