Huawei has a sub-brand known as “Honor”. According to the company, Honor is their e-commerce brand, and is only sold online. While Huawei’s products are sold in physical stores as well as online. Honor has been seen as a “cheap” brand, but not necessarily “cheap” in a bad way. Earlier this year at CES in Las Vegas, the company launched the Honor 5X for $199, and it blew just about everything out of the water. Now Honor is doing it again with the Honor 8, although it’s currently only destined for China.
The Honor 8 is the latest smartphone from Huawei, and it comes sporting a 5.2-inch 1080p display, powered by Huawei’s own Kirin 950 processor. This is an octa-core SoC, based on the big.LITTLE architecture with four Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.3GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. This is paired with the Mali-T880 GPU for good measure. The Honor 8 also sports 3GB of RAM along with 32GB of storage. And is priced at just 1999 Yuan ($299 USD). While there are two other models, including one that sports 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for 2,299 Yuan ($343 USD), and a third model that ups the storage to 64GB for 2499 Yuan ($373 USD). There’s a micro SD card slot included, which allows you to add up to an additional 128GB of storage.
On the camera front, Huawei has added in a 12-megapixel dual lens camera on the backside, with a 8-megapixel front-facing camera. The Honor 8 does also include a fingerprint scanner, NFC, USB Type-C and a 3000mAh battery. Which Huawei quotes as sporting fast charging support (that’s not the same as Qualcomm’s Quick Charge, which isn’t included since the Honor 8 doesn’t use a Qualcomm processor). Huawei will be offering up the Honor 8 in blue, gold, pink, black and white.
Currently, there’s no word on whether this device will be made available outside of China, but as for now it’ll be China only. If it does come to the West, especially in the US, it’ll likely swap out the Kirin 950 processor for something from Qualcomm. This is common with Huawei’s smartphones in the US, take the Huawei P8 Lite from 2015, for example.
