Hands-on with Huawei’s Honor 8—$400 for flagship-class specs

Huawei might not be well known in the US, but after Samsung and Apple, it's the third most popular smartphone OEM worldwide. The company's sub brand, "Honor," launched in the US in the beginning of the year, and today the company took the wraps off its second US-bound phone, the Honor 8. The device is more or less a cheaper version of the Huawei P9.

For $399, you get a 5.2-inch 1920×1080 LCD, an eight-core HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (with an SD card slot), and a 3000mAh battery. There's also the option of upgrading to a 64GB model for $449.99.

Don't worry if you've never heard of a "HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC." Huawei is one of the few companies that makes its own SoCs, and this division is called "HiSilicon." The Kirin 950 uses four 2.3GHz Cortex A72s and four 1.8GHz A53s, making it a high-end chip that should be within the ballpark of a Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890. Other goodies on the Honor 8 include a totally not optional 3.5mm headphone jack, an NFC, a USB Type C plug, a fingerprint sensor, and an IR LED.

The Honor 8 has a 12MP color camera and a 12MP monochrome camera, both on the back of the device, in a wacky dual setup. The traditional color camera does the usual camera tasks while the monochrome camera captures additional light information, and the software mashes information from the two sensors together. Huawei says this dual camera system captures "three times more light than a single lens." The rear camera setup also has laser autofocus and a background blurring feature. The front has an 8MP camera.

I've referred to a few phones as a "glass and metal sandwich," but here that description is more apt than usual: front and back glass panels sit on top of the metal sides. Most glass phones make the non-glass sides rise up and form a lip around the outside of the phone, partially protecting the glass. On the Honor 8 though, the glass panels are the highest points on both sides of the phone—the corner is glass, basically. We imagine dropping it would not go well.

Huawei is touting a "15 layer manufacturing process" for the glass back, which results in a seriously shiny and reflective back panel. Light bounces around the inside of the glass panel and displays all sorts of streaks and patterns. The process also makes the device a fingerprint magnet that's difficult to photograph. The Honor 8 will be available in three colors: black, white, and blue.

The fingerprint sensor on the back is also a clickable button. The button doesn't really have a "mandatory" function—volume and power buttons are already on the side. The fingerprint sensor click works as a "convenience key," like an old-school BlackBerry phone. You can set it to do a variety of things, like open an app, turn on the flashlight, or launch the camera.

The Honor 8 is probably going to live or die by its software, and it's running Android 6.0 with Huawei's "EMUI 4.1" skin. EMUI is a super-heavy skin that is very close to Xiaomi's MIUI skin. We're talking a full Android conversion to make it look and work like iOS. There's no app drawer, icons get square backgrounds with rounded corners, and overlays like the notification panel are displayed in a frosted glass panel. Recent Apps is now a horizontally scrolling thumbnail view, and the settings are an exact iOS copy. We'll have to dive in to see what stock Android features are missing from this, but it doesn't look great. We also asked Huawei if it was going to provide its customers with Android's monthly security updates. Huawei could not promise it would do so every month.

Preorders start August 17 at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo Video, Newegg, and direct from Huawei. Best Buy has an exclusive on the blue version.