I am hating to write lengthy reviews these days, and wanted to write this post a bit more differently. I just bought a Honor 8 pro from Huawei and wanted to bring up some of the things about this phone in this article. What better way is there rather than letting pictures speak for themselves …. So shall we jump in then ?
Phone Body
The front is made of Gorilla Glass, and I was expecting the rear of the phone to be glass as well but it seems to be made of ceramic or plastic which is not matte. Bottom line is that the front surface is extremely reflective, and the rear – very very slippery. The rear is also a fingerprint magnet which is no good again.
If you are not careful with this phone, you are bound to drop it very very easily. So a case and a strong tempered glass is absolutely essential. I happened to have the bad luck of letting it slip from my hand, but with not much damage except for a bit of scratches on the screen guard which was supplied.
Fingerprint scanner
This is one of the fastest implementation of the fingerprint scanner. I can confidently say its faster than Apple too. Place your finger on the “Backside” of the phone and you see the home screen or the app you were at when locked in a fraction of a second. Nothing more. But there is a flipside of this implementation.
You need to reach out to the backside of the phone always and in some situations you will not be able to do so and you will feel stuck. This is the reason rear finger print scanners are not always good.
The lack of a dedicated home button on the front means you need to always lift the phone and fumble to find that fingerprint sensor or type that long passcode to open the phone. Pretty irritating. Sorry Huawei – no marks for this.
The lack of double tap to open the screen to on state is also a sorely missed feature. A double tap does not do anything but a reverse knock on the screen takes a screenshot.
Display
Frankly even though the 5.7” QHD display is of 515 ppi pixel density, what is more interesting is the brightness of the display is very questionable in sunlight. So much so when the setting was to be at auto, and display at max brightness, I still couldn’t see a thing on the screen. You can see for yourself.
Indoor with auto setting
Display is clear and no issues reading stuff in this situation
Outdoor with auto setting – shade
Very very refective, but could see the screen though not very clearly. You need to have a viewing angle which is suitable for your eyes.
Outdoor with auto setting – in direct sunlight
You feel like throwing this phone away. Period. Nothing visible. My Samsung Note 5 was much better in this department. See for yourself.
Other Nifty Features
There are some other nifty features on this phone which I found good and useful and would be reasons for you to consider this phone. Let’s look at them one by one
Easy mark as read for messages
Even though this is not so much of a deal breaker, nevertheless it makes life so easy to swipe left and say mark as read by tapping once or twice max.
Info folder for SMS
These days we get lots of informative messages from Banks, notifications from Amazon, and so on… Huawei has decided to put these into an info folder for easy reference. Something I liked a lot.
Swipe down search
Pretty nifty as it is in the iPhone. Swipe down on home screen and you can search for your favorite apps. Was not the case with Note 5 from Samsung as it had two levels to reach to get there which was extremely annoying.
In another post I will talk about the selling point of this phone – its Camera & Battery, and we will compare Sound outputs between Honor and Apple on bluetooth.
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