The lower mid-range smartphone segment has been busy lately for all the good reasons. The price segment that the most Indian smartphone buyers are excited about has shown a good line-up of worthy smartphones. The Honor 8X is yet another contender that’s poised to go on sale in just a few days from October 24 onwards.
Since this price segment is crowded with quite a lot of great options to consider from, it makes sense to take a close look at what the Honor 8X brings to the table. So, if you are in the market for a lower mid-range phone with INR 15,000 burning a hole in your pocket, here’s what you need to know about the Honor 8X. Let’s take a look at the cool features that help this phone stand out from the competition.
Table of Contents
Chic Design
Aesthetics are highly subjective, but Chinese phone makers, of late, have made a concerted effort to jazz up the plain, boring black and grey look of smartphones. Now whether the striking, iridescent blues and reds found on the Honor 8X are gaudy or chic is entirely down to personal preferences, but you can’t fault Honor for opting for the much more expensive and classy glass sandwich chassis design. It has gone further and incorporated a neat two-tone finish on the glass back with what it calls “nano-scale” optical coating on one half and complemented by a more subdued grained texture on the other.
Honor 8X AI camera
Notched Bezel-less Display
The ultra-wide 19.5:9 ratio aspect on the display has been achieved in a relatively small form factor with the help of Chip-on-Film technology that allows the Honor 8X to reduce the chin significantly, whereas the notch also manages to take the bezel off the top. The end result is only 4.25mm of bottom bezel and a screen-to-body ratio of 91 percent. This is really good stuff considering the price of the phone.
What’s more, the IPS panel underpinning the 6.5-inch screen has a wide colour gamut covering an impressive 85-percent of the NTSC (equivalent to Rec. 709 colour space) spectrum, which might not be on par with the newer Rec. 2020 colour space, but it again is pretty good considering the price segment in which the phone is being sold. The 1080×2340 display also packs in a pixel density of nearly 400ppi.
20MP AI Camera
The camera sub-system is pretty well appointed, at least on paper. The primary camera features a 20MP with a wider f/1.8 aperture and features Phase Detection Auto-focus for faster image acquisition. The primary sensor is complemented by another 2MP sensor purely for depth sensing, which is essential for enabling camera modes such as portrait mode. The 16MP front camera is equally well configured on paper with HDR capability out of the box for snapping perfect selfies. However, all this is taken to the next level with Honor’s AI integration, which adds scene recognition for automatically choosing the right camera settings across 22 different categories and 500 scenarios in real time. The AI component also makes backlight portrait selfies look stunning by preventing over exposure of photos.
Honor 8X AI camera
Kirin 710 with GPU Turbo Boost
The Kirin 710 SoC is based off the 12nm fabrication process employed by the ARM Cortex series of processors powering the Honor 8X. The company advertises a whopping 75 percent improvement in the single core performance of the CPU, which is a tall claim that we will be testing in our final review. Nevertheless, the new Kirin 710 chipset is poised to be more powerful than the outgoing version. The GPU performance too has been claimed to be increased by 130 percent, which is further bolstered by Honor’s proprietary GTU Turbo technology that actually produces measurable performance increase in mobile games. The quad-core Mali GPU might not be the highest end graphics chip around, but it should still suffice for most games at decent framerates.
Face Unlock and Fingerprint Sensor
While the fingerprint sensor is the standard affair, the Honor 8X also comes with face unlock for a more convenient smartphone experience. While we haven’t tried the Honor 8X, we have experienced Honor’s own face unlock implementation and it works as advertised. This is a great feature to have and makes a huge impact on the quality of the overall smartphone ownership experience
