everyone Tim Schofield here it’s time to do a full review on the honor eight a device that falls into that $400 price point with some solid specs and I’ve been using this as my daily driver for a good amount of time now so I have a lot to say about not only the hardware of the device but also especially the software on this device so let’s go ahead and get started with the full review now to begin I want to talk about design of the honor 8 it is completely surrounded with glass with metal on the top bottom and sides now just like the galaxy s7 the glass is very reflective and also collects fingerprints like crazy so you’re going to be wanting to wipe the back ear device off pretty often on the bottom of the device you’ve your 3.5 millimeter headphone jack along with the USB type-c mono speaker which is below average doesn’t get very loud and the quality is not really that great so it’s a little bit below average USB type-c does have quick charge fast charge capabilities so keep that in mind it does charge very quickly and notice that glass on the display is a little bit raised so it’s got a little bit of a raised look coming off the sides now we go over to the
right side here and we do have power button which has a little bit of texture to differentiate between the volume rockers it’s not as smooth but it’s hardly noticeable it’s not a huge difference in the texture buttons feel very premium very quality is well overall the build quality is very good it looks great as well in my opinion up at the top you have a microphone and an IR blaster so happy they included that so you can control your TV and other various things with your phone as a remote moving on over you have your SIM card slot along with micro sd silk D card slots you have expandable storage as well on the back of the device you have your dual 12 megapixel cameras I’ll talk about those more in just a second you have a laser autofocus LED flash you have your fingerprint scanner and then down at the bottom it just specifically says honor the bottom of the device you just have honor again and the there are no capacitive buttons these are all soft back home and recent buttons and then up at the top you have your 8 megapixel front camera some sensors give an earpiece as well and then you have an LED flash as you can see right there in that earpiece so lets you know when you have
specific notifications moving along I want to talk about that fingerprint scanner that’s on the back and that also couples as a button so I want to talk about that as well because it is really cool of honor to add that I like this feature so let’s just go ahead and unlock the device so one two three and it unlocks so it’s very quick so no issues at all with speed of unlocking the device and I really have no issues with it not recognizing my finger at all you can use it when it’s on the lock screen as well just go ahead and set your finger on it and it unlocks one of the neat features about the fingerprint scanner that I use all the time is pulling down the notification bar so you’ll see I’m not even touching the screen and it’s going up and down and I’m literally just going up and down on this fingerprint button in it and it works really well as you can see it goes up and down on command now another one is that button so one of the buttons that I use all the time is double press and I have it synced to flashlight so I’d double click on it you’ll see that flashlight activates
double press and it turns off I also have it set up if I press and hold that fingerprint button it’s going to go ahead and open up Google now for me I also want to mention there’s an option for just pressing the button but I found that I accidentally pressed it a couple times so I turn that off and have it set on none but you can go ahead and set whatever you want voice recording flashlight screen shot or open any specific app that you want so nice job honor adding a neat function to your device also worth noting there’s other gestures such as take photo video you can answer a call with the fingerprint button stop alarm and also browse photos as well moving along I want to talk about that 5.2 inch 1080p IPS LCD display and I’ve been very happy with this display now let’s go ahead and jump into settings there’s a couple tweaks you can make to it which is just an added function to the display one of them being your color temperature and you can really customize this one so you’ll see you can touch and drag to make it cooler warmer they have a default cold setting at default warm setting and also just a default setting as well but you can really mess around with it and kind of tweak it to your liking also there’s an eye comfort mode which I always turn on at night where you can go ahead and turn it on and it gets rid of any of that blue lighting and it makes it
less strain on your eyes so that’s another nice addition that I think most phones that all phones should actually have and you can add a quick shortcut to that eye protection in the notification shortcuts with that being said overall it’s a very solid 1080p display yes you can actually get 2 K displays now of course on more flagship devices but with this price point you’re going to make a couple sacrifices and even though this is a 1080p this place a very good one it could get a little bit brighter outside and viewing angle angles could be a little bit better but overall for that price point I’m very happy with this 1080p display the honor eight has a three thousand milliamp hour embedded battery and I’ve been very happy with this battery life overall gets me through the day I generally don’t need to stop and charge it at all you’ll see five hour screen on time this day four and a half hours for downtime this day and a little over five hour screen on time this day so overall gets me about 4 hours and 45 minutes screen on time which gets me through the day I don’t
necessarily need to stop and say hey I need to charge my phone up real quick before I go out nothing like that it it’s very good battery life moving along I want to talk about that dual camera on the back now one of the lenses is for color the other one is for monochrome black and white so let’s go ahead and snap a quick picture right here and obviously good lighting scenarios and when it comes down to it shutter speed could be a little bit quicker but it’s not slow by any means but let’s take a look at some of these shots now when you are in good lighting scenarios the honoré camera does a very good job I’m very pleased with it when you are in pretty good lighting scenarios as you can see now let’s go ahead and jump into a picture I took the same picture in a lower lighting scenario and it’s not too bad but when it is in lower lighting conditions if you don’t necessarily hold it steady I could get a little bit blurry does not have optical image stabilization so I find that camera shots and lower lighting struggle a bit on the honoré but by no means are bad they’re still good shots but they are much better when you are in good lighting scenarios and it does a very good job as you can see here outside good
lighting conditions just the shot overall looks very good here’s another one close-up shots are also another one where the honor age shines overall just looks really good so let’s go back to that camera application in general I do want to make note that it does have a professional mode in case you’re wondering right there you can change the aperture all that good stuff ISO anything you’d like to if you are someone that likes to mess around with those type of picture-taking capabilities now switch to video mode and I want to jump into settings and show you guys real quick that it does not have a 4k option so for those of you wondering it only shoots at the most 1080p 60 frames per second so let’s go jump back that’s really about it when it comes to the camera just overall I have been pleased with it lower light shots could be a little bit better it’s not one of the best cameras out there by any means but it still is a very capable camera and for a $400 device it does a very good job now moving along I want to talk about some performance and specs as well so it has a Chiron 950 processor coupled with four gigabytes of RAM and that processor is actually why ways own processor and for those of you that don’t know why way does own honor so coupled with that 1080p
display I find that performance has been very good on this device I really have no complaints in terms of high end game framerate drops anything like that then when it comes to multitasking it switches between apps very quickly so let’s go and show that off so here’s settings let’s go ahead and scroll through maybe go to the Play Store real quick scroll down and scroll through let’s go back to settings maybe jump over to the camera and take a picture real quick so let’s load that up snap quick picture jump back into recent apps maybe one more app maybe the calculator app okay and hit plus 90 whatever okay now let’s go back to that asphalt 8 game and with four gigabytes of RAM you wouldn’t expect it to have to reload but it generally does I think RAM management in this device definitely needs to be updated especially with four gigs of RAM after going through all those things on other devices you really don’t have to see it reload you’ll see the game just completely had to restart I don’t go back into that current race that I was in anything like that night honestly I think it has to do with software on the device so that’s a good transition point let’s go ahead and talk about software the honor eight
runs Android 6.0 marshmallow as you can see right here and up at the top and big letters you’ll see emui 4.1 and if I don’t honor I would make that a little bit smaller because their skin is really not that good in my opinion it just has a lot of small annoyances it does have some good things about it but a lot of small annoyances which really get under my skin one of them being a very minor one but you’ll see if I scroll all the way down I have to wait for it to stop that animation before I can tap on about phone you’ll see I tapped at least four times but you’ll see if it’s trying to go down you really can’t tap up anything until that animation is done that’s one thing I’ve noticed just quickly going through the device next I’d like to talk about that lockscreen and one thing I like about the lockscreen is the changing wall papers it looks very nice you have a camera shortcut right there that you can swipe up but now you’ll notice I have two notifications right here a Gmail and Instagram notification and I have to physically unlock it and swipe down to check those because they were on there previously and I already already unlock the device now
with that being said you cannot pull down the status bar whatsoever on the lockscreen which needs to be changed and also when you have notifications you’ll see that you can interact with them but you cannot expand them whatsoever no expanding and if you swipe them you can only swipe to the right for one and when you do swipe it to the right it doesn’t swipe that notification away it physically opens the notification so as you can see that’s your only option with the lockscreen and you’ll see those other notifications aren’t showing up at all so overall I am NOT a fan of this lockscreen and having to completely unlock your device to check other notifications is pretty ridiculous speaking of notifications some of them look a little strange especially the Google Maps Navigation one here it is completely expanded check out how much text it cuts off you can use two fingers to minimize it but look at that that is ridiculous that is not what a huge applicable map should look like on your operating system skin some look just fine you’ll see Gmail if I try and expand it it looks just fine but look at this that is just insane and completely
ridiculous now moving along there are some good things about it’s not how bad with the software don’t worry guys you can swipe over and go to your shortcuts you can also set it up so if you have no notifications it’ll go straight to your shortcuts which I really do like you can customize these shortcuts as well with the edit button and see you have flashlight you can add ultra battery NFC screen recording floating dock so a bunch of different ones and you can customize the order as well one feature I do like our knuckle gestures so you can go ahead and use it your knuckle and go ahead and type a letter and you’ll see I open up the camera application with AC and you can customize those if you’d like another neat one that you can use is to take a screenshot so if I use my knuckle to draw a circle it’s going to take a screenshot of that specific circle and of course you can kind of edit it how you like and make sure it includes everything that you’d like it to look just another neat feature there’s a one-handed control mode where you can swipe down at the bottom and make it a little bit smaller that’s a great addition there’s a floating dock if you like that to add a little icon to access lock the screen and your other various icons you can also customize the navigation bar down at the
bottom so if you want to add rearrange the buttons and also add open notification panel you can do that as well they’re also bunch of motion control options such as flip to mute pickup to reduce ring volume tilt to move icons and widgets smart screenshot draw letter to open navigation which are those knuckle gestures I had talked about now also there is voice control and as I mentioned one-handed UI and a couple other scheduled power-on touch disable mode if it’s out if it’s inside your bag it’s going to disable touching on the display but overall a lot of various additions to the operating system which are nice I don’t necessarily use all of them but the ones that I do use are very helpful finally one more thing to make note of with the software is under Advanced Settings and I want to go ahead and go to battery manager and that being said there are so many options within this battery manager it’s pretty ridiculous there’s protected apps where you can protect specific ones from turning off in the screen turns off and I go ahead and hit protect also I don’t want any of my apps to turn off when the display turns off you can obviously go through and customize it based on every single app if you’d like to that’s a bit of a pain for me so I don’t necessarily do that but that’s an option for you they have optimized as well it scans everything and determines
which ways you can fix issues to help you save battery and then of course you do have power usage firewall which are power intensive apps that lets you know which apps use the most power so as you can see here’s the most power used apps you can close those out if you’d like to it also change the screen resolution to 720p if you’d like and also power plan they have smart and ultra as well which is basic call and message features alright so just want to get some final thoughts on the honor eight and overall the hardware is really great that fingerprint scanner is nice there’s additional features to it as well that add functionality and just overall if you can get past that software that it has that emui skin on there which hopefully will be updated in the future I’ll do videos of course if that gets updated and gets better but overall if you can get past that it’s a very good device for that $400 price point obviously the speaker could is really on a below average with bad real life the camera the display just overall hardware-wise it is a very good device but anyways that’s my full review on the honor eight hopefully enjoyed it click that thumbs up if you did you can also subscribe to my channel as well you found me a very social media all links will be in the description video below and as always guys thank you very much
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