Design of Honor 8X
The design of Honor 8X makes it different from the handsets of other companies. Glassy dual-tone color scheme has been used in the phone. The back panel of the phone is made of glass which gives it a premium look. The company has named it ‘Visual Grating Effect’, Honor says that several layers of glass (metal) have been used to make it. The design of the phone is so good that it does not look like a phone of the budget segment less than Rs 20,000. Due to the glass panel, it easily gets targeted by fingerprints and scratches. To protect the phone, you can use the cover that came in the retail box.
Another feature of Honor 8X is that it comes with a 91 percent screen-to-body ratio. Like Honor Play, Honor 9N, this phone has a small border at the bottom. Honor 8X has a 6.5-inch (1080×2340 pixels) IPS LCD display with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. The Honor logo is given at the bottom on the front panel of other smartphones of the company, but it has been removed in Honor 8X. You cannot use the display easily with one hand. While using many features, we needed to use both our hands. In India, this handset will be available in Classic Black, Trademark Blue and Bold Red colors. We have the Blue color variant for review.
For photography, you will see a vertical dual rear camera setup on the back panel. The rear camera is slightly raised. There will be a fingerprint sensor on the back panel for security. On the right side there are buttons for power and volume up and down, while on the left side of the phone there is a SIM tray (two nano SIMs and microSD card slot). On the lower part you will find a loudspeaker, 3.5 mm headphone jack, primary microphone and micro-USB port. At this price, the company has decided not to provide USB-Type C. The secondary microphone has been placed on the top of the phone. The build quality of the phone is good, but after using the phone for some time, we noticed that there were scratches on the glass back panel. To keep the size of the notch small, the company has kept the size of the earpiece small.
Honor 8X specifications and software
Honor 8X is the company’s first smartphone in India that comes with HiSilicon Kirin 710 processor. The same processor has also been used in the company’s Huawei Nova 3i smartphone. This processor will compete with handsets with Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 and Snapdragon 660 chipsets in this price range. We have 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage variant of Honor 8X available for review.
There are two more variants of Honor 8X – 6 GB RAM / 64 GB storage and 6 GB RAM / 128 GB storage, and their prices are Rs 16,999 and Rs 18,999 respectively. We did not face any problem in the phone while multitasking. There is also no shortage of storage to keep apps and photos. It is possible to increase the storage up to 400 GB with the help of microSD card.
Honor 8X has a 6.5-inch full HD + (1080×2340 pixels) TFT IPS display. The company says that the display uses a blue light filter (eye comfort mode), which is certified by TUV Rheinland. To power the phone, there is a 3,750mAh battery that comes with 5V/2A (10W) charging support. On the back panel, there is a 20-megapixel primary sensor with F/1.8 aperture and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. For selfies and video calling, you will get a 16-megapixel front camera, its aperture is F/2.0. Both SIM slots support 4G VoLTE, the phone includes ambient light sensor, electronic compass, gravity sensor, gyroscope, proximity sensor and fingerprint sensor for security. For connectivity, you will get dual-band WiFi 802.11 AC, Bluetooth version 4.2 LE, GPS / A-GPS, GLONASS and 3.5 mm headphone jack.
The Honor 8X we have is running on Android 8.1 Oreo based on EMUI 8.2.0. The handset will get Android Pie update but the company has not announced the date yet. Our handset is running on September 2018 security patch which is a good thing. You will get Facebook Messenger, Netflix, Camera360 and Lords Mobile pre-installed in the phone. The icons look quite big, apart from this you will get the Phone Manager app which will help you in doing many things like RAM, block selected apps, track data consumption, check for viruses and battery consumption. Now let’s talk about gestures in EMUI. If you swipe up from the bottom, the home screen will open, and swiping up from the bottom left or right will open Google Assistant. Honor 8X will get software based face recognition support. Face Unlock scans quickly and unlocks the phone. Its special feature is that the screen brightness automatically increases in low light and at night, due to which Face Unlock is able to work properly.
Honor 8X performance, camera and battery life
GPU Turbo technology has been used in Honor 8X. GPU Turbo improves performance by up to 60 percent and provides up to 30 percent better battery life during gaming. If Asphalt 9: Legends and PUBG are played on moderate settings, then it works fine. The experience of playing games like Subway Surfers and Candy Crush was quite good. During gaming, we found that the phone heats up very little and the battery consumption was also not much.
The Honor 8X has scored 140,435 on AnTuTu benchmark, 1,604 and 5,559 in Geekbench single and multi score tests respectively. These results of Honor 8X are much better than the benchmark scores obtained by Redmi Note 5 Pro with Snapdragon 636 chipset, Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1 and Xiaomi Mi A2 and Realme 2 Pro with Snapdragon 660 processor. In the camera app, you will get aperture, night, portrait, photo and video modes. Apart from this, Pro, Slow-mo, Panorama, AR Len, HDR, Time Lapse and other features are given in the More section. Let us tell you that the rear camera is capable of slow-motion video recording at a speed of 480 frames per second.
The rear camera focuses fast and works well in adequate light, but the picture quality is not that good. The 16-megapixel selfie camera is much better in terms of sharpness in picture quality. The quality of pictures taken at night is below average. The Honor 8X is capable of recording videos at 1080p at 60 frames per second, but you will find the phone pre-set at 720p.
The battery life of Honor 8X with 6.5 inch Full HD+ display is quite good. Once the phone is charged, it will last you the whole day. Even after using social media apps, checking emails, watching videos on YouTube and playing games for 15 minutes, the battery of our handset lasted the whole day. In the HD video test, Honor 8X gave a backup of 14 hours and 47 minutes. It takes more than 2 hours to charge the phone from 0 to 100 percent.
Our verdict
Honor wants to maintain its hold in the market by giving a premium look to the phone and launching good smartphones at low prices. Not only the design of Honor 8X, but the performance of the handset is also very good at this price. This has been possible with the help of the company’s new HiSilicon Kirin 710 chipset. Apart from the performance of the phone, its vibrant display and fast-working biometric security feature are its specialties. However, the camera quality is below average. The fast charging feature in the phone will be useful for you. Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro and Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1 have been maintaining their hold in the market for the last six months, but now to compete with them, apart from Honor 8X, smartphones like Nokia 6.1 Plus and Motorola One Power are also included in the list.