Friends+Design
- Stunning, premium design - the Honor 8X looks like the quintessential Honor smartphone, featuring a glossy textured glass back finish with its dazzling light reflecting properties, metal trim, notched display, and eye-catching looks all around - the 91 percent screen to body ratio and minimal chin is undeniably impressive, giving the handset even more screen to work with that Huawei’s flagship P20 Pro - it’s a great piece of tech to marvel at that rivals the look and feel of premium flagship handsets which cost significantly more
- The rear fingerprint scanner is highly responsive and face recognition is also very speedy, although not quite as fast as the higher-end P20 Pro
- You can't get around the fact though that this a giant phablet - while there’s plenty of screen real estate, reaching across the panel is a stretch with one hand - combined with the glass back and sharper edges than some other large handsets, the phone can be awkward to handle at times - this is not a phone for those who value ergonomics, it's one for those who want to have the best media consumption experience
Display
- Beautiful, bezel-less, 6.5-inch LTPS LCD display with a 2340 x 1080 resolution - even given the large display size, the Full HD+ resolution appears plenty sharp enough - the panel’s colors also pop with the appropriate fervor, resulting in bright and vivid images - sunlight legibility is also decent (though not exceptional)
- The largest display currently in this price bracket
Software
- The colorful icons and white UI elements of the EMUI interface can’t help but invoke Apple’s iOS - and though EMUI does deviate majorly from a stock Android experience, but the software is perfectly functional and avoids any major bloat - it also offers tons of customization, so you get options for the app drawer, notch toggle, View Mode sizes, and text sizes under the display settings to tweak the appearance more to your tastes
- There also a number of useful software add-ons like a gesture based navigation scheme (similar to the one on Android Pie), motion controls enabling features like raising the phone to your ear to automatically answer calls or flip the phone upside down to mute, and App Lock and Filesafe to provide ways to keep bits of information secure behind your fingerprint
Performance
- Very solid, snappy mid-range performance with the Kirin 710 SoC (similar to the Snapdragon 660) - the Honor 8X is a snappy device that zips through everything that you can throw at it
Camera
- The camera performance of both the dual rear camera setup as well as the front camera is decent but tends to be inconsistent, mainly due to overactive AI processing - and this is one area where Honor 8X can sometimes let you down, compared to the top competition in this price bracket
Audio
- Decent single bottom-facing speaker - sounds fairly decent and pumps out plenty of volume
Battery
- Outstanding battery - the combination of the large 3750mAh battery + good software/hardware optimisation results in a phone that will last you a good 2 days with moderate use - and lighter users could well extend usage well into a third day - plus there are some useful battery saving modes too - in terms of battery life, the 8X is one of the best performing phones in recent times
More
- On the whole, the Honor 8X is a great marriage of style and substance - if you don't care for the best camera phone for your buck, it's a solid choice, and one of the best looking devices you can get
- Uses the old MicroUSB port, instead of the new USB-C standard
