The Honor 8X is truly a remarkable phone and it left me smitten. From the performance down to the cameras, I can’t help but gush about this beaut! This review is just to elaborate more on the features previously discussed in the first impressions article. Let’s begin!
Design & Construction
The Honor 8X is a skinny legend: the sleek design is very stylish and compact. You might need to settle on a phone case if you are going to use the Honor 8X for gaming, as the smooth back panel coupled with the phone’s thinness makes it hard to grip horizontally. It has a small notch that holds the earpiece, the front camera and a sensor for face unlock. At the back are a fingerprint sensor and the dual rear camera.
There’s a sim card tray at the left side, and on the right are the power and volume control buttons. At the bottom is the USB Micro-B port for charging, a 3.5mm earphone jack, a mic, and the loudspeaker.
The back panel is really reflective you can almost use it as a mirror. The only downside is that the smooth surface of the glass is very prone to smudges and fingerprints you have to constantly wipe off.
Display
The Honor 8X has a nearly borderless FullView display with an incredible screen-to-body ratio of 91%, and there is very little color distortion when the screen is viewed at a different angle. Both images and text appear very sharp and crisp. The 6.5-inch display isn’t too straining on the eyes even when the brightness is turned all the way up. One of the flaws I’ve noticed is the unreliability of the automatic brightness adjustment settings, as it tends to drastically dim down the screen randomly even when under consistent indoor lighting. This can get really annoying sometimes especially when you’re playing games or reading messages, so it’s probably best to turn the setting off. But other than that, the display has three modes: eye comfort mode, night mode and sunlight display which cranks up the brightness to make it visible even under direct sunlight.
Camera
The Honor 8X has an amazing set of cameras that are accompanied by AI enhancements. The 20MP+2MP dual rear camera can snap vivid photos with great clarity. However, even without the AI setting, it has a tendency to oversaturate shades of red and tends to cool down color undertones especially when taking pictures outdoors. It can also capture images with great depth perception, but the autofocus struggles when a subject is nearby. The rear camera’s Macro mode doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, and in order to fully focus on subjects close-up, you’d have to resort going on Pro mode and manually adjust the focus yourself.
There are also other shooting modes you can experiment with such as the Ligh Painting mode, HDR, Time Lapse, Slow-mo, AR Lens and Filters. The Slow-mo feature doesn’t really do much, as the video quality is significantly reduced.
The 16MP front camera, however, is really impressive. Though not equipped with AI enhancements, there are beautifying filters and AR stickers you can play around with. It also performs well even in low-light conditions and can produce amazing selfies with flattering skintone colors.
Honor 8X Sample Camera Photos:
Performance
Powered by a Kirin 710 chipset together with a Mali-G51 MP4 GPU, I ran all sorts of games on the Honor 8Xto test its performance and it hasn’t let me down. From graphics-heavy FPS games, to online multiplayers and casual story-based games, the Honor 8X performed splendidly thanks to its GPU Turbo. Even with several game tabs opened, the 6GB RAM can handle heavy usage very well and the battery didn’t drain as fast as I expected it to. The Honor 8X offers lag-free gaming, and supports large Android games such as Mortal Kombat X, Tekken, Identity V and Nova Legacy. I also noticed that it tends to heat up quickly, but the rise in temperature doesn’t cause the phone to slow down. The long battery life is also a lifesaver, as it can keep you entertained for hours when you’re stuck on traffic or waiting in a long line.
As for the face and fingerprint recognition, it’s much more reliable than other phones that I’ve tested. The Honor 8X can stil distinguish my facial features even when I’m wearing glasses or in low-light settings. Its fingerprint sensor offers an easy yet secure option of unlocking your phone, should the lighting be too dark for the face recognition to work.
Another feature that I really love is the screen capture options. Aside from just taking plain screenshots, the Honor 8X can take a long screenshot and has a built-in screen recorder. Not all Android phones support internal audio recording, but with the Honor 8X you can film your gameplay using system sounds instead of relying on the microphone for audio.
For benchmarks, the Honor 8X has a single-core score of 1663 and a multi-core score of 5191 according to GeekBench. This puts the Honor 8X just slightly below the Huawei Mate 8 and the Huawei P9 in terms of benchmark scores.
In conclusion, the Honor 8X is a superb catch given the features it can offer for such a low price. It’s hard to believe that it only retails for Php 12,990 when other midrange smartphones of the same caliber often costs more.