Huawei Honor 8X: Price, Full Specifications and More

The Honor 8X ₹ 14,999 is all set to become the Huawei sub-brand’s latest mid-range smartphone when it launches in India on October 16. The successor to the last year’s Honor 7X, the new Honor 8X also has dual rear cameras, but with a refreshed vertical alignment. The new phone also uses Huawei’s latest in-house SoC, the octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 710. 

The Honor 8X will find itself in a market segment that is currently flooded with value-for-money options from manufacturers including Xiaomi, Asus, Motorola, and Nokia.

Design

The Honor 8X feels extremely solid and premium. Based solely on design, it does not look like a phone priced below Rs. 20,000. The back of the Honor 8X has a dual-tone color scheme which the company says is an evolution of the Honor 10’s rear gradient design. On the front is a massive 6.5-inch IPS LCD with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels, an aspect ratio of 19.5:9, and a pixel density of 397ppi. Much like other current Honor smartphones, there is a notch, but it looks relatively small in proportion to the large display. One interesting feature of the Honor 8X is that this display has a minimum brightness of just 2 nits, which should make it extremely comfortable to use in the dark.

Specification

There are no capacitive or physical buttons; you get to choose between onscreen keys and EMUI’s gestures. The left of the smartphone has the SIM tray, which has two Nano-SIM slots and a dedicated microSD card slot. On the right, there are the lock/ power button and the volume control keys. On the bottom, you’ll find a loudspeaker, a 3.5mm headphone jack, the primary microphone, and, disappointingly, a Micro-USB port. An Honor representative told Gadgets 360 that the company made the decision not to go for USB Type-C based on cost. The secondary microphone is placed on the top.

On the back, you get to see the vertically stacked dual camera setup that consists of a 20-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel depth sensor, both with f/1.8 apertures. The single selfie camera has a 16-megapixel sensor with a f/2.0 aperture. As with previous models, the Honor 8X has AI enhancements for both the rear and front cameras. Users can turn off the AI features when shooting if they prefer.

Display

In terms of security, you get a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and software-based face recognition. The fingerprint sensor was largely accurate and quick in our initial experience. Even the Face Unlock feature was quite snappy, although it might have difficulties in low light. Honor has implemented a nifty feature that increases the brightness of the screen in the dark to help the phone get a clear shot of your face.

At its core, the Honor 8X is powered by Huawei’s latest HiSilicon Kirin 710F, which has a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit). The company claims to deliver hardware-based device-level smart AI features. The Honor 8X will be the first smartphone in the Indian market with this SoC, and Honor tells us that it offers better performance than even Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 SoC. The phone will be available in three variants — one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage; one with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage; and then a top-end variant with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

Software

The Honor 8X runs Huawei’s custom EMUI 8.2 on top of Android 8.1 Oreo. While there is no official timeline, Honor says an Android Pie update will come soon.

As noted in the case of the Honor Play, the company has been gradually reducing the number of preloaded apps on its phones. We could spot only a few apps, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Netflix, Camera360, and a game called Lords Mobile. However, there are several of Honor’s own apps and features such as Phone Manager, HiCare, AppGallery, Health, Honor Club, Ride Mode, and Party Mode. Obviously, like all other Android smartphones, there are several Google apps including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Photos as well.