Last month, Honor made the Honor 8 official in China. Today, the company has announced that it is officially coming to the US. In fact, pre-orders are starting tomorrow, August 17th. For the most part, the specs for the Honor 8 are the same as its Chinese variant. That means there is a 5.2-inch 1080p resolution display here, powered by their own processor. That is the HiSilicon Kirin 950 octa-core processor. That is comprised of 8 Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.3GHz. Putting it right on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and the Samsung Exynos 8890 SoC’s. Additionally, Honor is going to offer it with 4GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of storage. While in China the 32GB model comes with 3GB of RAM. There is a micro SD card slot included so you can up the storage if you wish to do so. Honor has brought the dual-camera set up here to the Honor 8. It sports two Sony IMX287 sensors. One is a monochrome sensor while the other is RGB. It also sports a non-removable 3000mAh battery.
The Honor 8 is coming to the US in Sapphire Blue, Pearl White and Midnight Black. Now while the internals of the Honor 8 are pretty good looking, that’s not the whole story with this smartphone. Honor representatives have said repeatedly that the Honor 8 was designed specifically for “millennials.” They also noted that about 80% of their customers fall in the 18-35 year old range, so they designed the Honor 8 to target that market. The device has 15 layers of glass, which is much higher than the industry standard 8. They also used optical filming to show off some pure light affects. What this means is that in different lighting situations, the Honor 8 will look different. This is evident if you look through our hands on of the Honor 8. You’ll see that, specifically the Sapphire Blue and Midnight Black models, have different colors on the back. Perhaps not the feature that’s going to sell many people on the Honor 8, but definitely a pretty cool feature nonetheless.
On the back of the Honor 8, there is a fingerprint sensor. Not a huge surprise as we’ve seen this on Honor devices before. The company notes that this is their second-generation fingerprint sensor, so it’s even faster than the one found on the Honor 5X announced earlier this year. Since the Honor 8 is running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, it does support Google’s Fingerprint API. Meaning you’ll be able to use that fingerprint sensor for logging into your accounts in apps that support the API. There’s no Qualcomm Quick Charge on the Honor 8. That’s not a huge surprise since Honor is utilizing their own processor and not Qualcomm’s. However, there is a form of fast charging available. Honor says that you can get a 50% charge in about 30 minutes with the Honor 8. Which is pretty similar to Quick Charge 3.0’s charging speeds. Of course, that is only available with the charger that’s in the box.
The camera on the Honor 8 is similar to what was found on the Huawei P9 earlier this year. It’s a dual-camera setup, both sensors are Sony IMX298 with an aperture of f/2.2. You’ll notice that there is no Leica branding on the Honor 8, compared to the Huawei P9, which is probably a good thing after all of the backlash with the Huawei P9. Honor has included many modes here with the Honor 8’s camera, and of course monochrome is here (since one sensor is a monochrome sensor and the other is RGB, you’ll get better pictures in black and white). They have included a mode called “Ultra Snapshot” here which allows you to double press the volume down button when the screen is locked and it’ll unlock, open the camera and take the shot. This is all done within about a second. Making it one of the fastest launching cameras ever.
Honor 8 is going up for pre-order tomorrow for $399 for the 32GB model and $449 for the 64GB model, and it will be available at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo and HiHonor.com. This is an unlocked smartphone, and is not heading to any carriers, unfortunately. However, the Honor 8 will work on both AT&T and T-Mobile here in the US.
