The Huawei Honor 8 Review

Huawei’s smartphone branding strategy seems similar to many car companies. Toyota, for example, has the Lexus marque for high-end, luxury vehicles and the Scion marque that develops sporty, lower-cost vehicles with customization options targeted at millennials. Vehicles that carry the Toyota brand target mainstream consumers, covering a broad swath of the market with many different products.

Huawei’s Mate and P-series phones are analogous to Toyota’s Lexus brand, catering to the high-end of the market with premium performance and features, with the P-series specifically focusing on design and photography. In addition to its many other phones with varying features and price points, Huawei’s Honor brand parallels Toyota’s Scion, focusing on always-connected millennials. According to Huawei, 80% of Honor “fans” are aged 18-34, and delivering the performance, features, and style this demographic craves, while keeping cost within reason, is a significant challenge for Huawei.

After several years of declining sales, Toyota announced that it will discontinue the Scion brand in 2017. As an e-brand that’s distributed online without Toyota’s marketing budget and network of dealer showrooms, will Huawei’s Honor brand suffer a similar fate? For now sales continue to climb, with 40 million Honor phones sold in 2015, twice as many as the previous year. But Honor faces new challenges as it expands into new territories, such as the crowded and saturated US market, where it has little brand recognition.

Huawei’s first foray into the US smartphone market was with the Honor 5X, a lower-cost device with a well-balanced design. Encouraged by its initial reception, Huawei is back with a new device for the US—the Honor 8. While the Honor 5X hits a lower $ 199 price point, the Honor 8 costs twice as much but significantly improves performance and features. In many ways, it’s a restyled, less-expensive version of Huawei’s P9.

For starters, both phones use 5.2-inch 1080p IPS LCD displays. They also share similar dimensions (the Honor 8 is just a tad thicker and heavier) and the same 3000 mAh battery. The camera setup is the same too, with an 8MP sensor up front and dual 12MP sensors (one color and one black and white) around back, which I’ll discuss more later in the review.

	Huawei Honor 8	Huawei Honor 7	Huawei P9
SoC	HiSilicon Kirin 950 4x Cortex-A72 @ 2.3GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz Mali-T880MP4 @ 900MHz	HiSilicon Kirin 935 4x Cortex-A53 @ 2.2GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.5GHz Mali-T628MP4	HiSilicon Kirin 955 4x Cortex-A72 @ 2.5GHz 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz Mali-T880MP4 @ 900MHz
RAM	3GB / 4GB LPDDR4-2666	3GB LPDDR3-1600	3GB LPDDR3-1866
NAND	32GB / 64GB (eMMC) + microSD	16GB (eMMC) + microSD	32GB / 64GB (eMMC) + microSD
Display	5.2-inch 1920×1080 IPS LCD	5.2-inch 1920×1080 IPS LCD	5.2-inch 1920×1080 IPS LCD
Dimensions	145.5 x 71.0 x 7.45 mm 153 grams	143.2 x 71.9 x 8.50 mm 157 grams	145.0 x 70.9 x 6.95 mm 144 grams
Modem	HiSilicon Balong (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 6) FDD-LTE / TD-LTE / TD-SCDMA / WCDMA / CDMA (China only) / GSM	HiSilicon Balong (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 6) FDD-LTE / TD-LTE / TD-SCDMA / WCDMA / CDMA (China only) / GSM	HiSilicon Balong (Integrated) 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 6) FDD-LTE / TD-LTE / TD-SCDMA / WCDMA / CDMA (China only) / GSM
SIM Size	2x NanoSIM (w/o microSD) (dual standby)	2x NanoSIM (some models & w/o microSD) (dual standby)	2x NanoSIM (some models & w/o microSD) (dual standby)
Front Camera	8MP, 1.4μm, f/2.4	8MP, f/2.4, LED flash	8MP, 1.4μm, f/2.4
Rear Camera	2x 12MP (color + monochrome), 1/2.9” Sony IMX286 Exmor RS, 1.25µm pixels, f/2.2, Laser AF + depth, HDR, dual-tone LED flash	21MP, 1/2.4” Sony IMX230 Exmor RS, 1.12µm pixels, f/2.0, PDAF, HDR, dual-tone LED flash	2x 12MP (color + monochrome), 1/2.9” Sony IMX286 Exmor RS, 1.25µm pixels, f/2.2, Laser AF + depth, HDR, dual-tone LED flash
Battery	3000 mAh (11.46 Wh) non-replaceable	3100 mAh (11.78 Wh) non-replaceable	3000 mAh (11.46 Wh) non-replaceable
Connectivity	802.11a/b/g/n/ac, BT 4.2 LE, NFC, IrLED, GPS/GNSS, USB 2.0 Type-C	802.11a/b/g/n/ac, BT 4.1 LE, IrLED, GPS/GNSS, microUSB 2.0	802.11a/b/g/n/ac, BT 4.2 LE, NFC (EVA-L09 only), GPS/GNSS, USB 2.0 Type-C
Launch OS	Android 6.0 with Emotion UI 4.1	Android 5.0 with Emotion UI 3.1	Android 6.0 with Emotion UI 4.1

Both phones come with either 32GB or 64GB of eMMC NAND for internal storage, which can be augmented with a microSD card. The Honor 8, like the Huawei Mate 8, does use a different SoC from the P9. The four ARM Cortex-A72 CPUs in its Kirin 950 SoC only reach 2.3GHz versus the 2.5GHz in the P9’s Kirin 955, but this will not make a big difference in day-to-day use. Rounding out the big.LITTLE arrangement in both SoCs are four Cortex-A53 CPUs running at up to 1.8GHz and a Mali-T880MP4 GPU at up to 900MHz. While the T880 is currently ARM’s flagship, using only four shader cores limits peak performance. For comparison, the international version of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 comes with a Mali-T880MP12 GPU with three times as many cores. The Honor 8 does make the jump to LPDDR4 RAM, although it’s unlikely this will improve performance because the Kirin 950 and its quad-core GPU are not bandwidth limited.

In our Mate 8 review, the Kirin 950 SoC scored well in both peak performance and efficiency, a result of HiSilicon’s excellent implementation of A72 CPU cores on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET+ process. HiSilicon claims that the Kirin 955 SoC in the Huawei P9 is even more power efficient than the 950, so it will be interesting to see how the Honor 8, with the same size battery and screen, compares in our battery life tests. Along with the efficient SoC, the Honor 8 also includes the i5 sensor hub that further reduces power consumption by offloading specialized tasks such as voice recognition, step calculation, and mp3 music decoding to its ARM Cortex-M7 processor.

Huawei also includes some software features for further stretching battery life. There are three different power modes—Performance, Smart, and Ultra—that adjust the CPU DVFS curves and tailor network usage. The Smart mode is selected by default and promises a sensible balance between performance and power. There’s also the ROG power saving mode that limits screen resolution to 720p, reducing the GPU’s workload and the amount of data transferred over the memory bus. The power firewall feature (off by default) detects “power-intensive” background apps and automatically closes them.

The Honor 8 comes with Bluetooth 4.2 LE and 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi courtesy of the Broadcom BCM4345 (the same solution found in the P9), but does not support 2×2 MU-MIMO like the Galaxy S7. It also comes with NFC, which is absent on all but one version of the P9, and an infrared LED for universal remote control duties, another feature missing from the P9. On the bottom is a USB 2.0 Type-C port for data transfer and fast charging.

Residing inside the Kirin 950 SoC is a HiSilicon Balong baseband processor supporting Category 6 LTE speeds—up to 300 Mb/s down and 50 Mb/s up with 2×20 MHz carrier aggregation and 64-QAM on the downlink.

Frequency Band Support
Carrier (Country)	AT&T / T-Mobile (US)	Telecom (China)	Mobile / Unicom (China)
FDD-LTE	B1 / B2 / B3 / B4 / B5 / B7 / B8 / B12 / B17 / B20	B1 / B3 / B4 / B7	B1 / B3 / B7 / B8
TDD-LTE	–	B38 / B39 / B40 / B41	B38 / B39 / B40 / B41
GSM	850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900	850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900	850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
WCDMA	B1 / B2 / B4 / B5 / B8	B1 / B2 / B4 / B5 / B8	B1 / B2 / B5 / B8
CDMA	–	BC0	BC0
TD-CDMA	–	B34 / B39	B34 / B39

The version sold in the US works on AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s networks, and it also supports the necessary frequencies to work in Europe. The Chinese models include support for the requisite CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, and TD-LTE frequencies used by the national carriers.

The Honor 8’s SIM tray holds one NanoSIM card and either a second NanoSIM or microSD card. When using two SIMS, it functions in Dual-SIM Standby mode with the second card (user selectable) supporting only GSM voice calls.

There’s two configurations available for sale in the US: The 4GB / 32GB version costs $ 400, and the 4GB / 64GB version costs $ 450. Both versions are available in black, white, blue, and gold colors from select online retailers. Chinese customers get a third, less-expensive option with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for ¥1999 (~$ 300).

With its eye on millennials, Huawei focused on giving the Honor 8 a stylish design. It takes some design cues from Huawei’s P9, but wraps them in a more rounded, smoother chassis like the iPhone’s. The aluminum frame is sandwiched between edge-to-edge glass on the front and back, giving it both a shiny, polished look and a very slippery feel that makes it difficult to grasp or to set on seemingly flat tables without it sliding off. The Honor 8 seems to loathe gravitational potential energy, because it’s always trying to drop to the floor.

The front and rear glass edges have a 2.5D radius that helps them blend into the chamfered edges on the aluminum frame. There’s still a small step as the materials do not flow together perfectly, but the edge breaks are enough to eliminate any sharpness along the sides while still providing some tactile feedback and additional grip when holding the phone.

As phones continually get thinner, it becomes increasingly difficult to find space within the chassis for a camera’s sensor and lens array, leading to unsightly camera bulges on the backs of some phones. The Honor 8’s dual cameras, however, sit flush with the back and are covered by the rear glass. Huawei is pretty proud of this accomplishment, and it’s directly related to its dual-camera setup. By using both sensors together, the Honor 8’s cameras collect the same amount of light as a single, larger sensor. And because the smaller sensors require less z-height to fit an equivalent focal length lens, the overall thickness of the camera module is reduced. The two smaller sensors also fit into the space above the display where there’s extra room to work with. Placing the camera(s) in a more central position on the back means that some of the z-height inside the chassis is taken up by the display assembly, forcing the camera module to protrude from the back like on the Galaxy S7.

Placing the rear cameras in the upper bezel means they need to be offset to one side in order to make room for the earpiece, front-facing camera, and sensors on the front. This results in some asymmetry, but I feel this is a fair compromise for a smooth back. Huawei did align the dual-color LED flash with the centered, circular fingerprint sensor on the back, which is a nice touch and keeps the elements on the back from looking too unbalanced. The capacitive fingerprint sensor is recessed slightly with a chamfered edge that makes it easy to locate.

Underneath the Honor 8’s rear glass is 15 different layers, including filters, color-etched nano-film, and a milled 3D diffraction grating that diffuses light in interesting ways when moving the phone. The color also changes depending on the ambient light, and there’s a subtle swirled texture beneath the glass when looking closely. This attention to detail gives the Honor 8 a luxurious appearance; however, the glass back tends to attract fingerprints and is obviously less durable than metal or plastic.

All of the buttons are located on the right edge, with a single-piece volume rocker positioned close to the top and just above the power button that has a very slight texture to it. The thumb on my larger-than-average hand falls right between the volume down button and the power button, making the controls easily accessible. People with smaller hands may have some difficulty reaching the volume buttons, though. Biasing the buttons towards the top, like Huawei does with the Honor 8, makes it less likely to press the buttons accidentally when handling or picking up the phone.

The SIM tray is located near the top of the left edge, and there’s a small, plastic antenna strip near the top of both edges. Because the pieces below the glass are made from plastic, there’s no need for the antenna strips to continue across the front and back.

The USB Type-C port is centered on the bottom edge, with the single, downward-firing speaker to one side and the 3.5mm headphone jack on the other. The second, noise-canceling microphone is on the top edge along with the IR blaster.

There are minimal bezels on the sides of the display, but the lower bezel is a bit larger than expected considering the fingerprint sensor is on the back and there’s no capacitive navigation buttons. While this places the top of the screen further out of reach, it does provide a place to hold the phone, especially in landscape, without accidentally tapping the screen.

The upper bezel is the same size as the lower. The earpiece is of the smaller variety, making it difficult to hear sometimes if not perfectly aligned with the ear. Like other Huawei phones, the Honor 8 hides a notification LED under the right side of the grille covering the earpiece. The front-facing camera and proximity/ambient light sensors sit to the left, an asymmetrical layout that makes room for the dual rear camera module on the other side.

The Honor 8 is slippery but comfortable to hold. Its rounded corners do not dig into the palm, and the radiused glass and slightly curved sides of the aluminum frame eliminate sharp edges. Its smooth, glossy appearance trades durability for elegance and matches the Galaxy S7 in build quality.

The Honor 8 currently comes in three different colors: Pearl White, Midnight Black, and Sapphire Blue like our review unit. The blue color is definitely my favorite, partially because it’s different from the usual silver and gold. Its shade changes from a deep blue to an electric blue depending on lighting conditions, making it nice to look at but difficult to photograph. Huawei is also adding a gold-colored version on October 20, 2016.

Perhaps the biggest problem within the Android ecosystem today is timely software updates. This includes core Android updates as well as monthly security updates. The update policies of Chinese OEMs are particularly egregious, with some companies providing essentially no software support beyond their own apps. While not the worst offender, this is one area where Huawei needs to improve.

With the Honor 8, the company is “making a commitment to provide customers with access to new features (at least once every three months during the first 12 months) for at least 24 months following each product launch,” and “will keep providing access to security and software updates to fix bugs and enhance user experience in a timely manner.” This sounds like a small step in the right direction (it took 9 months for the Honor 5X to receive an update to Android Marshmallow), but it says nothing about an update to Android Nougat and does not set a timetable for security updates, just that they will be delivered in a “timely manner,” which is rather subjective. Since I received the Honor 8, it has received one security update, jumping from the July patch to the September patch, which is somewhat encouraging I guess; however, all Huawei is really committing to is providing quarterly updates for its own apps and EMUI skin. It’s a bit unfair to point our fingers solely at the OEMs and carriers, of course, because it was Google that created this mess and, ultimately, only Google can clean it up. Until then it seems quarterly security updates and one Android update arriving 9-12 months late is all that the OEMs can or are willing to do.

The Honor 8 comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Huawei’s EMUI 4.1 skin on top. Like nearly all OEMs, Huawei uses software as a differentiator for its products, adding several features and completely restyling the user interface. For better or worse, Huawei completely disregards Google’s Material Design guidelines; EMUI looks more like iOS than AOSP, FWIW.

The lock screen cycles through some nice background pictures and shows the time and date in the lower-left corner and a shortcut to open the camera in the lower-right. What’s missing on the lock screen by default are notifications. To see them without unlocking the phone, you can either pull down the notification shade, or you need to manually enable lock screen notifications for each app individually. When notifications appear, they can be dismissed but not expanded to reveal additional information.

In an effort to simplify its interface, Huawei does not include an app drawer in EMUI. Instead, all apps live on the home screen. The icons can be repositioned anywhere on the screen or grouped into folders. The default app icons are squares with rounded corners, which do not match the style of Google’s icons, which do not match the style of third-party icons, but such is life on Android. It’s possible to tweak the appearance with theme packs, or you could go with a third-party launcher for different functionality.

Sample of Huawei’s apps: Dialer, Contacts, and Calendar

Huawei includes several of its own apps that cover basic smartphone functions such as email, messaging, contacts, calendar, camera, dialer, music, gallery, etc. These are in addition to the usual suite of Google apps (except in China). I did not have time to use Huawei’s apps in depth (neither Google or Yahoo would allow me to sign in using the Email app citing security concerns), but they seem functional and look pretty, although they certainly do not follow Google’s design guidelines.

The recent apps screen uses a side-scrolling array of app preview cards instead of vertically scrolling cards like stock Android. Switching tasks works the same way as it does in Xiaomi’s MIUI, but unlike iOS, the cards do not overlap and you scroll from left to right to go further back in time. Entering and exiting the recent apps screen is almost instantaneous, because there’s essentially no transitional animation slowing things down.

The notification shade is divided into two tabs, separating notifications from the quick setting toggles to reduce clutter, with a dark-frosted, semi-transparent background. On the notification tab, there’s a handy button to clear all notifications and a nice looking timeline. This latter feature is a little confusing because notifications are not always listed in chronological order, probably because of how multiple notifications from the same app are grouped together. Swiping down on a notification expands it to reveal more information—the sender and subject for each email instead of just the total number of new emails received, for example. The quick setting toggles on the other tab can be rearranged and swapped out, but only nine toggles can be shown on the screen at once, which is a silly limit considering the window still has empty space and there’s already a scroll bar next to the toggles.

There’s two user-selectable methods for pulling down the notification shade. The default behavior is to show the notification screen if notifications are present or the quick settings screen otherwise. The second method will show the notifications if you pull down from the left side of the screen or the quick settings if you pull down from the right side, allowing quicker access to the information you want.

Customizable nav buttons and Smart key (left), Floating dock (right)

Jumping into the redesigned and more colorful settings menu reveals a handful of optional features. For starters, the standard back, home, and recents buttons in the navigation bar can be rearranged, and you can add an additional button to lower the notification shade like on LG’s phones. The “floating dock” feature adds a small circular button that hovers over window content and is visible on the home screen, within apps, and even full-screen games, which is a bit annoying. Tapping the button expands it into a circular menu that shows the standard Android navigation buttons, a button to clear all recent apps, and a button to lock the screen. This feature is similar to the SmartTouch feature in Meizu’s Flyme OS or AssistiveTouch in Apple’s iOS.

The Honor 8’s “Smart key” feature uses the fingerprint sensor on the back, which also functions as a clickable button, as a shortcut to start a voice recording, turn on the flashlight, take a screenshot, or open a specific app. Separate actions can be assigned to either a single press, a double press, or a press and hold of the button. This can be a useful feature, but it needs a longer list of actions to choose from to truly unlock its potential.

EMUI motion controls and knuckle gestures

The Honor 8 includes common motion controls, such as flip to mute and raise to answer a call, alongside Huawei’s less common knuckle gestures. Rapping the screen with the backside of a knuckle (the front side and top of the knuckle do not register as well) will take a screenshot, while the same gesture with two knuckles will start or stop recording what’s happening onscreen. Drawing the letter ‘S’ with a knuckle takes a scrolling screenshot. You can draw up to four other letters with your knuckle to open apps too. This works on both the home screen and the lock screen (but not with the screen turned off), although it’s difficult to get the phone to recognize that you’re drawing a letter instead of swiping to scroll. I’m not ready to become a knuckle dragger, but I’m sure some people will find this feature useful.

Huawei’s EMUI also includes a couple of features that improve one-handed use. Sliding a finger across the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen will scale the entire display to a smaller size, placing everything within a thumb’s reach. The mini screen will anchor to either the lower-left or lower-right corners depending on which direction your finger slides across the nav bar. This approach works very well, making it easy to pull down the notification shade regardless of hand size. The only drawback is that text becomes smaller and more difficult to read. Huawei also provides an option to shrink the keyboard and dock it to either side of the screen, but this only works within its own apps.

Huawei’s EMUI strays pretty far from the stock Android experience, both in terms of design and functionality. There are a few idiosyncrasies that I’ve pointed out, but overall I like what Huawei is doing. If you do not care for its design, you can always replace Huawei’s apps with Google’s or those from third-parties. Ditto with the launcher. All of the convenience features Huawei adds can be turned off too, but I find some of them quite useful.

The Honor 8 uses a JDI (Japan Display Inc.) IPS-NEO LCD panel, just like the Huawei P9, which supports in-cell touch (the touchscreen layers are integrated into the display stack instead of existing as separate layers above the display) and panel self-refresh. The panel uses LTPS (Low Temperature Poly-Silicon) TFT technology that features higher carrier mobility than a-Si (amorphous silicon) TFT. This enables higher aperture ratios, allowing the panel to transmit light more efficiently, and because the drive circuits reside on the glass substrate, the black border around the display’s active area is thinner. This particular 5.2-inch panel has a resolution of 1920×1080, giving it a pixel density of 423ppi, which is plenty for an LCD display.

While the Honor 8 uses a high-quality panel, it requires proper calibration if it’s going to deliver excellent image quality. If Huawei fails to set gamma, white point, and RGB balance correctly, grayscale and color accuracy will suffer. To evaluate the display’s performance, we’ll use an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer for color measurements and an i1Display Pro colorimeter for luminance measurements, with SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 software managing the data.

The Honor 8’s maximum brightness is just shy of 500 nits, a decent value that makes the display easy to see in most conditions except direct sunlight. It’s a little disappointing that it cannot match the 550 nit brightness of the less-expensive Honor 5X, and a little curious it falls noticeably short of the P9 with a similar display. The P9’s backlight uses 20 LEDs to increase peak brightness, so either the Honor 8 uses a different backlight assembly or our review samples are just at the extreme ends of hardware variability. At its lowest setting, the Honor 8 drops all the way down to just 3 nits, making it suitable for viewing in a dark room.

We measure the black level and contrast ratio at maximum brightness, which makes direct black level comparisons more difficult because a display’s black level increases with brightness; however, after normalizing for this effect, the Honor 8’s black level is about the same as the iPhone 6s’ and only slightly higher than the G5’s, giving it a very good contrast ratio overall. It appears the Honor 8’s display makes use of photo-aligned crystals and content-adaptive backlight control (CABC) to improve black levels.

The phones with OLED panels are not shown in these charts because they are able to achieve a black level of zero and a mathematically infinite contrast ratio by being able to completely turn off individual pixels.

         

SpectraCal CalMAN

Unfortunately, Huawei continues to ship phones calibrated to an overly cool white point. The Honor 8’s “Default” temperature setting yields an average correlated color temperature (CCT) of almost 9,000K, which is even worse than the LG G5. The elevated levels for the blue and green primary colors and deficit in red give the Honor 8’s display a very obvious blue tint. If the display is not blue enough for you, however, there’s a “Cold” setting that increases the white point to about 9,500K. The “Warm” setting brings the average CCT down to less than 7,800K, but the emphasis on the blue and green primary colors at the expense of red gives the display an odd turquoise tint.

In addition to these three settings, it’s possible to select a custom white point target by dragging a finger around a color wheel. There’s no benefit in doing so, however, because the average CCT will not drop below about 7,900K and it’s impossible to correct the RGB imbalance that makes the screen look blue/turquoise.

The Honor 8’s average ΔE2000 grayscale error of 8.82 at its Default setting (Cold and Warm are even worse) is among the worst we’ve measured in the past few years, with a peak error of about 14 at 100% white. Gamma is a little high too, hovering around 2.3 over the full luminance range, reducing shadow detail and making images look a little darker than they should.

SpectraCal CalMAN

         

The Honor 8 uses a wide color gamut display that extends coverage for reds and greens but surprisingly comes up short for blues relative to the standard sRGB gamut. The larger gamut coupled with Android’s lack of color management means most colors appear oversaturated by as much as 20%. Shades of red are an exception, with lighter shades appearing undersaturated. Unfortunately, the Honor 8 does not have an sRGB mode, so there’s no way to improve saturation or color accuracy.

         

SpectraCal CalMAN

All three of the Huawei phones show poor color accuracy, which is no surprise considering the calibration issues each have with RGB balance and, to a lesser extent, gamma. The Honor 8 and P9 also have wide-gamut displays that oversaturate colors.

Regardless of the color temperature setting, the Honor 8’s display registers a ΔE2000 error above 3 (the threshold where error is generally considered unacceptable) for almost all of the tested colors. Skin tones are particularly bad, which is unfortunate considering how much time we spend using our phones to look at pictures of people. Average color error is similar to the LG G5 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 that’s half the Honor 8’s price.

Many OEMs are now including special display modes that filter out blue light for use at night to reduce eye strain and improve sleep patterns. The Honor 8 includes Huawei’s “Eye comfort” mode for just this purpose, which is definitely warranted given its very cool white point. The RGB balance chart above shows how this mode restricts the blue primary’s output while boosting green and red. The result is a heavily yellow-tinted display with a warm 6000K white point. Grayscale and color accuracy are not the goal here, so we can ignore the grayscale error values. This mode is obviously not suitable for watching movies or viewing pictures; however, it is useful for reading text in low ambient lighting or before going to bed. It does take a few minutes for your eyes to adjust from the radical shift in white point, though.

Our review unit does not show any backlight bleed or issues with luminance uniformity, but its viewing angles are not as good as other IPS displays. In addition to the usual IPS glow at extreme angles, there’s a red-tinted sheen and reduction in brightness that shows up almost immediately when the screen is tilted or viewed off center. The effect is most pronounced when rotating the phone between portrait and landscape mode. It’s definitely something I notice during use, however, it’s not distracting enough to be a dealbreaker. Also, when viewing the display through polarized sunglasses, it remains viewable from all angles, but the screen looks dimmer and shows some slight discoloration in portrait mode (landscape mode looks fine).

For a phone that costs $ 400 or more, the Honor 8’s display fails to impress. It’s poorly calibrated, lacks an sRGB mode, and viewing angles are not what they should be for an IPS display. It does get reasonably bright and has good black levels, but that’s just not enough. The similarly priced OnePlus 3, for example, delivers rich, saturated colors in its default mode or very accurate colors in the well-calibrated sRGB mode. Huawei really needs to focus on display quality if it wants to compete with Apple and Samsung.

The Honor 8 uses almost the same camera setup as Huawei’s P9. I say almost because the Honor 8 does not share the P9’s Leica lens array or image processing algorithms that Huawei co-developed with Leica. I’m not sure exactly what’s different about the Honor 8’s lens design, but Huawei told me that the P9’s lenses are rather complex, resulting in a manufacturing yield of only 10% initially, so I’m sure there’s a cost versus performance tradeoff. Also for the P9, Huawei modified its image processing software to accommodate Leica’s requirements, one of which was color fidelity, so I expect some differences in color saturation with the Honor 8.

Like the P9, the Honor 8 places two 12MP Sony IMX286 Exmor RS sensors on the same PCB to keep them on the same plane and to minimize the variance in distance between the two sensors. The 1/2.9” format sensors use 1.25µm pixels that have a slightly larger full-well capacity than the standard 1.12µm pixels.

What makes the Honor 8’s rear camera setup special, however, is that one sensor uses an RGB Bayer color filter array, but the other sensor does not. This second black-and-white-only sensor captures twice the amount of light as the color sensor without the Bayer filter in the way. The Honor 8 uses its two sensors to improve color photo image quality by combining the luminance data from the black and white sensor with the color data from the other sensor, producing a single 12MP image that’s theoretically brighter/less noisy with higher contrast than an image taken by the color sensor alone. Unlike the P9’s Leica branded camera, however, the Honor 8 cannot capture native black and white images using just the black and white sensor.

The task of merging data from the two sensors falls to the dual-core image signal processor (ISP) inside the Kirin 950 SoC that’s capable of processing 960 MP/s with 14-bit precision. A second ISP—which is separate from the Kirin 950 and developed in cooperation with an undisclosed industry partner—is dedicated to calculating distance, a primary component of the Honor 8’s hybrid autofocus system that combines traditional contrast-based AF with a short range (less than 3 meters) laser AF module for low-light conditions and depth sensing using both rear cameras for long-range focusing. According to Huawei, using a dedicated ISP is 200% faster than running depth calculation software on the CPU.

The Honor 8 and P9 share the same 35mm equivalent focal length (27mm according to EXIF data) and f/2.2 aperture. The actual aperture area, which controls how much light reaches the camera sensor, is relatively small, unfortunately. For example, the HTC 10’s aperture area is 55% larger than the Honor 8’s, the Galaxy S7 is 49% larger, and the G5 is 44% larger. The Honor 8’s aperture is 18% larger than the iPhone 6s Plus, but with less light reaching the sensors, the Honor 8’s low-light performance may be limited.

The default “Photo” interface in Huawei’s camera app offers a very basic point-and-shoot experience. There’s a large shutter button that can be held down to take burst photos, a button to switch between shooting photos and video, and a button to access the photo gallery. The left or top edge, depending on orientation, holds toggles for controlling the flash, activating the wide aperture mode, accessing some photo filters, and switching between the front and rear cameras. Unfortunately, the HDR toggle is tucked away in the Modes menu. As usual, tapping the screen will refocus and sliding a finger up or down adjusts exposure.

Swiping in from the left edge in portrait or the bottom edge in landscape opens the Modes menu. Beauty modes that smooth away wrinkles and skin blemishes, adjust face shape, or even apply faux makeup are popular features, and the Honor 8 includes a basic mode that selectively smoothes skin (but not other features like facial hair). Even at its max setting, it does a decent job of ignoring my beard and smoothing the wrinkles around my eyes, even while wearing glasses. The beauty mode works with both the front and rear cameras while shooting both photos and video.

Swiping in from the right edge in portrait or the top edge in landscape opens the camera settings menu. Unlike the modes menu, the settings menu does not rotate into landscape mode. Among the standard options is a toggle for the object tracking AF. You can also enable the “Audio control” that will automatically snap a picture when you raise your voice or when you say “cheese.” This is a little, well…cheesy, but it actually works as long as there is not too much background noise, and it can be enabled separately for the front and rear cameras. The “Capture smiles” feature is another alternate means of taking a picture. In this case, the shutter is triggered just by smiling at the camera.

The Honor 8’s camera app also includes a “Pro photo” mode for the rear camera that allows for manual control over the usual settings. The interface, shown above, is easy to use and places the controls within easy reach of a thumb in portrait mode, but the interface does not rotate or change when the phone is rotated into landscape.

The camera app retains automatic control by default. This allows you to set the shutter speed manually while the camera automatically adjusts ISO to get the right exposure or vice versa. Other camera apps force you to set both ISO and shutter speed manually at the same time, which makes exposure adjustments more time consuming, especially if you only want to control shutter speed for freezing or blurring motion rather than actually changing the exposure.

The Honor 8’s manual mode is not as comprehensive as the LG G5’s or Galaxy S7’s; there’s no option to save RAW images, for example. It’s also difficult to manually adjust focus without a focus peaking feature or without a magnified view of the focus area. Another minor complaint is that there’s no exposure meter. Instead there’s just a little sun icon that pops up in the corner with a plus or minus sign to identify if the image is over or underexposed.

The Honor 8’s simulated wide aperture feature uses the dual rear cameras to capture a depth map. Images taken with this feature enabled show a little shutter icon in the gallery that when tapped opens an image editor. As shown in the video demo above, you can change the focus point (technically it’s more a point of emphasis) by simply tapping on different objects in the image, shifting focus from one object to the next. You can then adjust the depth of focus by sliding a finger up or down on the screen to increase or decrease the simulated aperture between f/0.95 to f/16, effectively altering the amount of blur applied to the foreground and background. After applying the changes, you can save a copy of the new image while retaining the original image and depth map for making additional tweaks in the future.

I’m impressed by how well this feature works after using it on both the P9 and the Honor 8. It does not get confused by overlapping objects and even worked properly when I took a picture of an object on the other side of a clear plastic cup. This feature does work best when the subject of the image is within 2 meters or about 6.5 feet from the camera. Also, it cannot fix a blurry, unfocused image, which would require taking multiple images at different focal lengths. The Honor 8 takes a single image, however, so the subject(s) need to be in focus when the picture is snapped. It then uses the depth map data to move the point of emphasis within the image and then varies the degree of blur applied based on distance from that point.

The Honor 8 is not the first phone with a dual camera nor will it be the last (it will not be long before it’s a standard feature), but it’s still fairly novel and interesting. To see what advantages (if any) it brings, I’ll be comparing its performance to several other cameras in a range of different settings. Unfortunately, the OnePlus 3 and HTC 10 are not available for testing, but the Samsung Galaxy S7 (12MP, f/1.7, OIS) will serve as a reference for high-end performance, while the Huawei Honor 5X (13MP, f/2.0) will serve as the lower bracket. The LG G5 (16MP, f/1.8, OIS) and Motorola Moto Z Play Droid (16MP, f/2.0) are also in the mix. The Huawei P9 uses the same sensor hardware as the Honor 8 but uses different software and Leica branded lenses, so it will be interesting to see if these add up to better photos. All of these phones capture images natively with a 4:3 aspect ratio except the 16:9 G5, and all of the images were taken using the stock camera app’s Auto mode unless noted.

Daylight Photo Comparison 1

In this first sunlit scene all of the cameras capture nice-looking photos, but there are some noticeable differences. The Honor 8 and Huawei P9 take a good exposure using the same ISO and shutter speed settings and avoid clipping the clouds like the Honor 5X and Moto Z Play. The Galaxy S7 is more conservative, slightly underexposing the scene.

The LG G5 captures the most accurate colors; it’s the only camera that does not oversaturate the blue sky. The Moto Z Play is a close second followed by the Honor 8 and P9, which give the sky a purplish tint. Both the Galaxy S7 and Honor 5X miss the proper white point: The Galaxy S7’s image has a slight green tint while the Honor 5X’s image is too cool.

Taking a closer look reveals that the Honor 5X’s image shows the most visible noise grain, although it’s still acceptable. The images from the G5 and S7 also show a bit more shot noise in the sky than the Honor 8, P9, and Moto Z Play. Comparing the Honor 8 and P9 shows a significant difference in noise reduction processing. The P9 does a little better job smoothing the sky, but it selectively applies more processing to darker areas in the image, smearing away detail from the bushes, grass, and rocks sitting in shadow while preserving detail in sunlit areas. The Honor 8 avoids this issue, and as a result I’d say the Honor 8 captures a better overall image than the P9 here.

Daylight Photo Comparison 2

All of the phones except the Honor 8 and P9 overexpose this image and clip the highlights on the truck’s hood, with the Honor 5X going the furthest and clipping the sidewalk and sky too. It looks like the Honor 8 and P9 take a faster exposure to avoid clipping and then compensate by adjusting gamma higher to brighten the image. The result is a bright, nicely exposed image that’s lacking a bit of color saturation. Personally, I think the Honor 8 and P9 take the best images in this scene. Plus you can always increase color saturation with image editing software later, but you cannot recover the detail that’s lost in the clipped highlights from an incorrect exposure.

The Honor 8’s image also looks the best after zooming in. There’s very little noise with a high level of detail; the lettering on the building is clearly visible. The P9’s photo is similar but again we see it selectively apply more aggressive noise reduction on darker areas of the image, in this case wiping away detail from the road. Once again the Galaxy S7 and G5 show more noise grain than the Honor 8 and P9, but it’s a minor difference. The G5 somehow manages to show more noise than the S7 and still smear away more detail, particularly noticeable on the road. The Honor 5X’s photo has more visible noise grain everywhere and the Moto Z Play’s image shows some jpeg compressions artifacts around the lettering on the building.