It seems that Honor has confirmed that the Honor 8 smartphone is set to be released in India in the middle of next week, on Wednesday October 12. The Honor 8 was released earlier in the year (back in July) and is a solid smartphone with decent performance and battery life. At the current time, Honor had not released the launch price but we do know the device will be available in Midnight Black, Pearl White and Sapphire Blue colors. Honor is one of Huawei’s sub-brands, together with Kirin, the chipset brand.
As a refresher, the Honor 8 is a mid to high-end, dual SIM, LTE-enabled smartphone based around a 5.2-inch, 1080p resolution LCD panel. The back of the device is also constructed from glass although there are cutouts for the two camera set up and a fingerprint sensor. Under the skin, it is powered by Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 950 chipset, a big.LITTLE design combining a powerful quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 application cluster, clocked at up to 2.3 GHz, together with a less powerful ARM Cortex-A53 cluster, clocked at 1.8 GHz. The Kirin 950, built using a power-efficient 16nm process size, represents an older generation chipset compared with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, but in this case the chip is backed up by a healthy 4GB of RAM and the ARM Mali T880-MP4 GPU. The Honor 8’s camera set up consists of two 12-megapixel rear cameras, which are joined by a front facing 8-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies and video calling. For networking, the device’s LTE modem supports VoLTE technology, although this will also depend on the carrier supporting this too. Other radios include high-performance 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC. There’s a 3,000 mAh internal rechargeable battery, which is recharged via the USB Type-C port. On the software front, the Honor 8 is powered by Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) under Huawei’s custom EMUI 4.1 interface.
It will be interesting to see what Honor price the Honor 8 at in India. The unlocked device is $399 in the North American market and as such we would expect the device to have a similar equivalent Indian price. This also means it competes with the OnePlus 3, the Xiaomi Mi 5, and LeEco Le Max 2. $399 converts to approximately 26,500 Indian Rupee. By comparison purposes, the OnePlus 3 retails for around 28,000 Rupee. The Samsung Galaxy S7 price starts from 38,000 Rupee and it probably should be expected that the Honor 8 will significantly undercut the Samsung flagship.