Huawei Honor 8 Goes On Sale In The U.S. For $399.99

Huawei is not a brand that would first come to your mind when you think of smartphones. The Chinese telecommunications giant that was earlier known more for its network infrastructure is now among the biggest manufacturer of smartphones on the planet. In fact, as per a recent IDC report, Huawei is now the third largest smartphone maker on Earth trailing just behind the giants: Samsung and Apple. As Huawei tightens its grip in several markets across the planet, the company is also investing heavily in the U.S. market. The latest Huawei product to go on sale in the U.S. is the new Huawei Honor 8, which the company announced just a week ago. The Honor 8 is now listed for sale on the official Huawei Honor website.

Let us now take a quick look at the spec sheet and the features you would find on the Huawei Honor 8.

To start with, it should be known that the Honor 8 succeeds the Honor 7 that the company announced sometime last year. For the same reason, you will notice that the Honor 8 gets a similar display size and resolution — which in this case happens to be a 5.2-inch display with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels. This translates to a PPI density of just over 423 pixels-per-inch.

While most companies do not try experimenting with tried and tested designs, Huawei doesn’t seem to be shy about trying out new things. The design language of the Honor 8 is a marked departure from the squarish, boxy looks of the Honor 7. While the Honor 7 had a great metallic body, the Honor 8 uses a lot of glass, making it look even more premium. The phone is quite thin as well, measuring just 7.5mm across.

Hardware

This is where Huawei does even more interesting things. While most of the other players (with the notable exception of Samsung), depend on mobile SoCs from makers like Qualcomm and MediaTek, Huawei has several handsets that use the company’s in-house mobile chip from the Kirin series. The Huawei Honor 8 uses the Kirin 950 SoC that houses an octa-core chip with four cores clocked at 2.3GHz and the remaining four clocked slightly lower at 1.8GHz. The Kirin 950 processor is a slightly watered-down version of the more powerful Kirin 955 chip that is found on the Huawei P9, which is a more premium handset from the same company. The Honor 8 gets 32GB of onboard storage space which can be expanded further using microSD cards. The handset also has ample 4GB of RAM.

Camera

Like its predecessor, the Huawei Honor 8 is claiming to be a very capable imaging device. The Honor 8 gets dual 12-megapixel cameras at the back and an 8-megapixel front camera for selfies. The dual camera setup seems to be similar to what is present on the Huawei P9 — a slightly more expensive device that the company launched. Like in the case of the P9, one of the sensors exclusively shoots monochrome images. Thanks to the dual lens setup at the rear, optical image stabilization is a bit difficult to integrate. For the same reason, the phone is not that great with stable videos. The highest video resolution has been capped at 1080p at 30fps. Unlike the P9, the Honor 8 does not support phase detection autofocus.

Software

The Huawei Honor 8 runs Huawei’s own Emotion UI 4.1, which is a custom skin that has been layered on top of an Android Marshmallow core. For those who have been used to stock or “near” stock Android UI, there will be a slight learning curve to get used to this one. Like we previously mentioned, the Huawei Honor 8 is now listed to be on sale in the U.S. The handset is SIM free and unlocked as well. As for the price of the Honor 8, the device has now been listed at $399.99. This is of course, without any contract or carrier integration.

Do you think the Honor 8 would be a worthy successor to the Honor 7? Please do let us know in the comments section below.

[Images Via Huawei]