Honor 8X Review – Best Choice for your Standard Phone User

Honor 8X is the latest mid-range smartphone from Honor India which was launched at the starting of the month in India. This phone is the successor to the highly popular Honor 7X which was not bad either. BUT…yes a ‘BIG BUT’, Honor surprised themselves with what they were able to offer at just Rs 15,000 price range this time with the Honor 8X. The stunning design, exquisite display and the rear multi-margin pattern with optical coating made this phone one of the best looking smartphones even when compared to flagship devices.

Honor 8X Review

Let’s dig in and review the new Honor 8X phone at a common man’s point of view by concentrating on actual things which one uses in his/her daily life.

Honor 8X – Unboxed

The mobile retail box is a typical honor and comes in a pleasant blue-white combination. It contains the phone itself and to our surprise the screen guard is already applied to the phone, so one less job for us. Apart from the phone, the box comes with documentation, Power adapter, USB cable, Transparent Silicon Case and SIM-Ejector tool. Sadly, we won’t be getting an earphone but then these days almost all phone manufacturers have started to skip this to cut cost.

Transparent back case & pre-applied screen guard for the phone, gets an up vote.

Also Read: Realme new U-Series phone will rock powerful Helio P70 Processor

Design & Display

As we have highlighted earlier, the first impression of the phone is really good. The design language followed in the phone with the presence of glass built across the phone with light reflecting rear and dual tone effect gives it a breathtaking look. Especially, the blue and red colors will surely attract you with this design element. Not forgetting the front display with the trendy notch ( though a little bigger for my liking ) and bezel-less 6.5’inch FHD+ display with up to 91% screen-to-body ratio completes the smart looking smartphone.

However, one should take additional care while holding as it will be slippery due to the glass build and will also be prone to frequent smudges.

The phone is built in a thin 7.8mm body and has 3.5mm jack, micro-USB and speakers at the bottom. The volume rocker and power buttons are present at the right side and the top. Fingerprint sensor is present at the back side near the center of the phone. Finally, the dual-rear cameras are arranged vertically with a slight bulge and the front camera is hidden inside the huge notch at the front.

Design and Display gets a big thumbs up & are miles ahead of its competitors like Redmi Note 6 Pro, Realme 2 Pro.

Performance

Honor 8X is powered by new HiSilicon Kirin 710 chipset with Mali-G51 MP4 for graphics. There are 4GB & 6GB RAM variants and in this review we are using the 4GB variant. The performance of the phone was smooth as butter for daily routine and multi-tasking activities. For heavy duty activities such as HD video playback and graphics intensive game, the phone handled them with no issue.

Though, we could feel temperature increasing near the rear camera when these were done continuous for longer time period. It should be noted that Honor has incorporated the GPU Turbo technology for optimized gaming performance.

Also Read: Huawei Mate 20 Pro with Kirin 980 Processor launching in India on November 27

For reference, check out few numbers on the phone’s benchmark scores. Honor 8X scored 1,40,168 points on AnTuTu. It scored 1600 on single-core Geekbench test and 5629 on multi-core score test.

Impressive performance but could struggle against continuous high-end heavy duty tasks especially games.

Software & Network

The smartphone runs EMUI 8.2 based Android 8.1 Oreo OS right out-of-the-box. EMUI is as usual colorful and to aid the bezel-less full view display, it supports gesture navigation. Apart from this, it comes with host of customization options or the app drawer, notch toggle, View Mode sizes, and text sizes to change the appearance of the layout. It comes pre-loaded with Honor own apps like like Game Suite, Mirror, Compass, Weather etc.

For security, you will get fingerprint sensor, ride mode, File Safe and App lock features. You’ll also get the option to hide the notch of you don’t want, change resolution of the display and play with the color temperatures of the screen. The call and network coverage quality is quite good. The phone supports dual 4G VoLTE but there is no support for native video calling. Hope a software update fixes it very soon. The Speaker volume is decent at best and even if you use earphones, one needs to have the volume higher for easy use.

Very usable interface and you can easily disable unnecessary apps and features

Camera

Honor 8X prides itself to have AI camera with the wording present in the phone itself. The setup consists of primary sensor offers 20-megapixels of resolution with a f/1.8 aperture and Phase Detection Auto Focus. The second sensor has just a 2-megapixel resolution used entirely for depth calculation. The default camera app comes with various modes like Pro mode, AR Lens, Night mode, Aperture and Portrait mode.

The AI-enabled camera does a good job of capturing bright and colorful pictures under good lighting conditions in both indoor and outdoor condition. AI present in the camera recognizes the scenes fast and adjusts the properties of the images to give a decent output. However, under low-light condition the performance of the camera is a mixed bag with nosily images and reduces sharpness. The front camera does a decent job of taking portraits with bokeh effect and even the face unlock if working quite well.

Predominately a superb camera performance with minor downs, especially in low-light & indoor condition

Battery

The battery capacity of Honor 8X is 3,750mAh battery and it gives you a commendable backup. You can easily go through a complete day with heavy usage and about 1.5 days with casual/routine usage. The device supports fast charging so one need not worry about the long charging time. Additionally, the phone comes with two power saving mode in case of low battery scenario.

Excellent battery backup considering the big screen.

Is Honor 8X worth it

Yes, for the aim to provide users with a premium device in all aspects at bargain price and limited compromise the Honor 8X is worth every penny. In terms of the design and display, no phone in its category could compete with this. So its the best choice for the average smartphone user who is not a Geek or a hardcore gamer or professional photographer.

In terms of Camera, it does fall back on any aspects except on few places. For raw performance, there is no drawback either and battery backup is amazing as well. Honor has pulled off a winner in Honor 8X and if you are someone who flaunts his smartphone for its looks and needs equally impressive performance, go for it.

Realme 2 Pro and newly launched Redmi Note 6 Pro are the main competitors and it stands up to them in all aspects. Redmi Note 6 Pro offers a better camera and battery performance but in design, display and power it lags a bit.  Only if performance is your criteria, then check out the Realme 2 Pro ( has Snapdragon 660 ) else Honor 8X doesn’t have any reason for not going for it.