Overview of the Honor 8X smartphone
| Specifications | |
| Dimensions and weight | 160 × 76 × 7.8 mm, 175 grams |
| Body materials | Glass, metal |
| Display | 6.5 inches, 2340x1080 pixels (FullHD +), LTPS LCD, aspect ratio 19: 9 |
| operating system | Google Android 8.1, branded EMUI 8.2 shell |
| Platform | HiSilicon Kirin 710 (4x2.2 GHz Cortex-A73 + 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53), graphics Mali-G51 |
| Memory | 4 GB of RAM, 64/128 GB of internal memory, microSD up to 256 GB |
| Wireless interfaces | WiFi a / b / g / n / ac DualBand, Bluetooth 4.2 (A2DP, BLE, HWA, aptX / aptX HD), NFC |
| Network | 2G: 2/3/8 MHz Bends 3G: 1/8 MHz Bends 4G CAT 4: 1/3/7/8/20 Dual SIM Cards |
| Navigation | GPS / AGPS / Glonass / BeiDou Navigation System |
| Sensors and connectors | Fingerprint scanner on the back, microUSB |
| Main camera | 20 MP + 2 MP, f / 1.8 aperture, focal length 27 mm |
| Front-camera | 16 MP, f / 2.0 aperture, focal length 27 mm |
| Battery | Li-Pol 3750 mAh, Huawei 5V / 2A, 100% for 2.5 hours |
| Colour | Blue, black and red |
| Price | 18 000/20 000 rubles |
Positioning
In Russia, the presentation of the Honor 8X was held in late October. At the event, spoke about the line X and its positioning. So, the X series is considered to be advanced, that is, it has some of the flagship functions, technologies or design ideas. For example, 5X was the first smartphone in a certain price segment of the Honor brand, which was equipped with a metal case. Then came the 6X with two main cameras, and the 7X received an elongated FullView screen. And what distinguishes the Honor developers in the 8X model?
First of all, the useful area of the display is 91%.Interestingly, with this result, the brand entered the top five companies that produce devices with a similar ratio of body area to the screen. In order to achieve this figure, the engineers created a new antenna design for the 8X phone, and also installed a microUSB connector under the glass (COF technology) and not under the panel (COG technology), like most smartphones.
In the second - the design of the device. Here applied 15 layers of glass with different levels of reflection.
The third - dual cameras with Ai-recognition functions for different scenes. Also implemented the "Night" mode and shooting video at 480 frames per second.
Other important aspects: capacious battery 3700 mAh, NFC chip, a triple slot for two SIM cards and a memory card, a lot of memory - 4/64 GB or 4/128 GB.
That is a very interesting offer for 17 990 rubles, where you can also get a gift: a fitness tracker, PowerBank or sports headphones.
Appearance
Huawei has found its own distinctive style of smartphone design, and now almost every new device looks the same as the previous one. For Honor 8X, they decided to slightly diversify the appearance, equipping the rear panel with two types of glass: reflective and almost non-reflective. The first occupies about 70% of the case surface on the reverse side. On this strip are two cameras and the inscription HONOR. In my opinion, this design option looks nice, at least 8X can be accurately distinguished from any other phone of the company.
The phone is sold in two bright colors - red and blue, also in the sale of strict, but no less elegant black. My review turned red. The color is really bright and attracts attention: the back side is mirrored, a thin plastic insert for glass cushioning and a metal edging matte. The front panel is black. In general, Honor played on the contrast.
And what about the fingerprints on the glass? Yes, they generously cover the entire back panel, but they are relatively easy to erase. And about the oleophobic coating is not forgotten? Yes, it is present, the quality is good.
Given the large screen diagonal, the dimensions of the case are rather big - 160 × 76 × 7.8 mm, and the phone weighs just over 170 grams. It became more and more difficult to describe the sensations in the hand: the gadgets with screens of 5 inches, 6.5-inch overgrowths “come” to the test. Now I use the Mate 20, so the Honor 8X is perceived as a “healthy person” phone.
Surprisingly, on the first day of the acquaintance with the device I somehow managed to put a scratch on the back cover. By the way, almost all Huawei devices suffer from this "disease", that is, the glass is scratched very quickly.However, in fairness, it is worth noting the following fact: whatever the manufacturer says about glass (Corning Gorilla Glass, tempered, sapphire), anyway, small Kotsks will be in their rightful place.
The manufacturer claims that the screen occupies 91% of the useful area of the front side. In the positioning he wrote that the engineers made some special design of the antenna wiring and hid the connector for charging under the glass. The presentation compared the lower frame of the Honor 8X with phones from other manufacturers, but it was clear that we are talking about Samsung and Apple devices. And there the frame was thicker: 5.8 mm for South Koreans, 6.8 mm for a company from Cupertino, and 4.25 mm for engineers from China. I don’t think that these figures are important for the end user, but every millimeter is important in the battle for the mobile market.
In the upper part of the device, light and proximity sensors, a front camera (above it there is a small indicator of missed events) and a speech speaker were installed. It is loud, the sound is clear and pleasant, the tone is uniform (there is enough medium and high frequencies). The main thing is that the speaker is located standardly, that is, on the front panel, and not somewhere above the top (ardent greetings of Mate 20).
At the bottom - 3.5 mm audio output, microphone, microUSB and speakerphone. On top is an additional microphone for noise reduction.
On the left - a triple slot for two SIM cards and one memory card, on the right - the power button and the volume rocker key (metal, do not play).
On the reverse side there are two protruding two millimeters of lens, a single-section flash recessed into the body and a round fingerprint scanner.
Display
I could be wrong, but Honor 8X decided to put the largest screen of all the devices that were presented by Huawei for the Honor brand - 6.5 inches.
The 8X matrix is made using LTPS technology, with a resolution of 2340x1080 pixels. Nowhere is the cut in the upper part. Do not like this decision? Then go to the settings and hide, as I call it, indecency. I did just that in my P20 Pro, but in Mate 20 the cutout is so small that you don’t need to hide it.
The maximum brightness of the display backlight is 440 cd / m2, the black brightness is 0.53 cd / m2, and the contrast is 830: 1. The quality of the screen 8X no complaints: the impression is good: high brightness, pleasant color reproduction and maximum viewing angles. However, the black level is somewhat redundant.
Working hours
Battery Honor 8X put a decent - 3750 mAh. Most Honor devices have this capacity, which is good. In my operating conditions, the smartphone worked full time (from 10 am to 11 am) with an average load.
At a maximum brightness of 440 cd / m2, the 8X model plays video for 10 hours, and with games, the battery sits in 5 hours. At Honor Play, plus or minus are the same parameters as the surveyed device.
Included with the phone comes a 5V / 2A power adapter.The battery is powered by it for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Communication features
Traditionally, the smartphone works with two SIM cards of the nano format. Interestingly, the engineers also left a slot for a microSD memory card. Both nano-SIM work in 4G CAT 4 networks (bands 1/3/7/8/20). From the point of view of communication, the Honor 8X is just great: the quality is high.
Wi-Fi wireless communication works in two bands - 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, ac standard is supported, Bluetooth is version 4.2 (BLE).
An important and extremely pleasant bonus is the NFC chip. No problem reading "metroshnye" cards.
The phone works with GPS, GLONASS and Beidou.Instantly finds up to 22 satellites, even indoors, close to the window. In open areas, it operates with 15 - 25 satellites, accuracy - from 3.5 meters.
SAR value near the head - 0.81 W / kg, near the body - 1.02 W / kg.
Memory, chipset and performance
New for the Russian market is equipped with 4 GB of RAM and 64/128 GB of internal memory. The RAM speed is 7200 MB / s, this is one of the best results among smartphones up to 20 000 rubles. As a rule, such a speed is given out by devices for 25,000–30,000 rubles. The speed of the built-in memory is 150/236 MB / s. Again we see a decent read / write speed.
HiSilicon Kirin 710 (4x2.2 GHz Cortex-A73 + 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53) with 12 nm technical process, Mali-G51 graphics is used as a processor. As far as I know, the first device with this chip was the nova 3i. Judging by the tests, the Kirin 710 can compete with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 (14 nm process technology). In terms of overall performance, the chips are the same, but in games “Snap” with Adreno 512 will still be better.
In the Antutu Benchmark test, the smartphone is gaining almost 140,000 points, which is more than enough for a device for 18,000 - 20,000 rubles! The phone is fast, lags and brakes during the "communication" was not found.
Software
This model is still working on the old version of EMUI 8.2 based on Google Android version 8.1. We are waiting for the update.
What's new in EMUI 9, you can read in our review. Link below.
Cameras
This time the combination of cameras is as follows: one module on the front panel (16 MP, f2.0) and two modules on the reverse side (20 + 2 MP, f1.8). As you understand, a simple 2 MP camera is only needed to participate in the blurring of the background - digital bokeh.
The quality of photos is average, which, in fact, should be expected from the device for such money. Mainly a claim to sharpness at the edges of frames, to artifacts, to a small dynamic range. Portraits Honor 8X shoots perfectly, with good detail and relatively true selection of the background.
In the Night mode, you can get bright night shots, but, again, because of the simple camera modules, the quality leaves much to be desired: it seemed to me that the P20 Lite shoots better.
The use of Ai in this case did not benefit: the frames simply turn into a color mess. There is nothing similar to the similar work in the Huawei P20 / P20 Pro. Consider that in each photo unscrew the saturation.
The maximum video resolution is FullHD, the frame rate is up to 60 fps. The impression was that during video recording, focusing could not determine infinity: the image is slightly blurred, the quality is average. The Kirin 710 processor allows you to write videos to Slomo at 480 frames (HD) per second. As far as I understand, not a single modern smartphone up to 20,000 rubles is able to do this.
The front camera shoots very well, there are no questions here.
Photo examples
Multimedia
The smartphone is equipped with one speaker. It is loud, but the quality is not impressive. There are Huawei Histen audio effects with ten-band equalizer settings from 30 Hz to 16 kHz.
The sound was evaluated with friends Meizu Flow - typical “plugs” and Bose QC35 - typical overhead “ears”. I liked the sound more in the Meizu headphones, since the Bose wire was weakly pumped by the smartphone.
Impressions
In my subjective opinion, the Honor turned out to be a great inexpensive phone with all the modern features: an elongated screen with a cut-out, two cameras, a capacious battery, an NFC chip, a large display and a lot of memory.
Despite the fact that, in general, the smartphone makes a positive impression, it also has certain disadvantages.For example, the brightness of black is quite high, so with good brightness of white, the contrast is moderate. The main cameras are frankly weak. I think the P20 Lite shoots better, while having the same cost.
The disadvantages include the lack of an update to EMUI 9. Still, the smartphone should work faster with this software.
The rest of the device Honor 8X is universal: in black color will suit conservative consumers, and in red and blue - youth. In addition, as a gift, they give either Honor Band 3 fitness tracker for 3,000 rubles, or an external battery for 4,000 rubles, or Honor Sport sports headphones for 3,000 rubles.
Before you conclude, it is worth describing the range of competitors.
- Huawei P20 Lite . It costs 18,000 rubles. One of the best camera phones. This we found in the materiallink . The characteristics of plus or minus are the same, but the P20 Lite looks simpler and cheaper.
- Honor Play . It costs 20 000 rubles. It uses a powerful Kirin 970 processor. There are two cameras, the battery capacity is the same as that of the Honor 8X.The body is made of metal. The screen is slightly smaller. Judging by my review, the Play matrix is simpler.
- Meizu 15 Lite . It costs 20 000 rubles. Beautiful compact smartphone without NFC. Excellent Qualcomm processor, a lot of memory, good cameras and a music chip. Minus - battery capacity of only 3000 mAh.
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro . It costs 20 000 rubles.The device is deprived of the NFC chip. Everything else is more or less interesting: Snapdragon 636, two cameras and a 4000 mAh battery.
I think I would advise you to take a closer look at the Meizu 15 Lite if NFC is not required, and take the P20 Lite from behind the camera. If appearance is important - Honor 8X, something stronger glass - Honor Play with a powerful processor.
