Good tech

New Honor 8X is a cutting-edge smartphone that carves out niche with competitive pricing and specs

WE ALL love high-end smartphones bursting with all the latest features and technology, but no one loves paying the exorbitant prices these marvels of portable computing command. I’ve long wondered why there aren’t more handsets with specs that come close to matching the flagships, but at a significantly lower price.

The honchos at Huawei have clearly pondered the same thing and they’ve now moved to fill that gap in the South African market with a top-notch offering from their youthoriented brand, Honor (yes, it’s spelt the American way without a U).

The newly-launched Honor 8X comes the closest of any phone

I’ve yet encountered to delivering bleeding-edge tech, solid build quality and great looks, all at a third of the price of heavy hitters from the likes of Samsung and Apple.

Honor who?

While virtually unknown in South Africa, Honor, a sub-brand of Chinese tech giant Huawei aimed at the youthful, trendy set, is already big name in Asian markets, Europe and, increasingly, in the US after

embarking on an aggressive international expansion drive in

2014.

The Honor 8X, its latest flagship smartphone, was launched globally in September. With several other devices due to arrive in South Africa in the coming months, Honor looks set to add South Africa to the list of 74 countries in which it’s made its mark.

From the boss’s mouth

Speaking at the local launch of the 8X, Chris Sunbaigong, president of Honor MEA, said the company was setting out to hit new benchmarks in terms of balance between value, design and performance.

“We have launched a device that enjoys flagship features at a budget friendly price to cater to our digital natives, the millennials. We know that millennials are super tech-savvy and that is why we have maxed out all the features found in a flagship and wrapped a price tag on the Honor 8X that does not burn a hole in their pockets.”

Eye candy

It certainly doesn’t look and feel like a budget device. The 8X is the first Honor phone to have a 6.5” “full-view” display with a 91% screen to body ratio and that notch made so popular by Apple. It may not match the resolution of OLED displays from top-end Samsung, Apple and Huawei handsets, but it blows anything else in its price bracket out of the water.

It is also the first smartphone ever to come equipped with a new generation eye comfort mode certified by TÜV Rheinland – a feature the company says can reduce blue light radiation emitted by the screen to prevent eye fatigue.

Specs appeal

The Honor 8X is no slouch when it comes to performance either. Between the screen and glass body, girded by a metal frame, is a powerful octa-core Kirin 710 processor that delivers plenty of grunt.

The software it’s running is EMUI 8.2, a Huawei-modified version of Android 8, and the 64GB of internal storage is a pleasant surprise for a phone in this price bracket.

Snap happy

Mobile photography buffs won’t be disappointed by the dual-lens

20MP + 2MP rear and 16MP front facing cameras. Honor’s borrowed some of Huawei’s artificial intelligence (AI) smarts, which lets the 8X recognise 22 different categories and 500 scenarios in real-time to optimise camera settings and enhance photo quality. Honor claims the night shooting mode enabled by this AI tech eliminates the blurring of photos when taking night shots under a maximum six-second exposure, even with a shaky hand.

Bottom line

With a recommended price tag of R5499, the Honor 8X looks, feels and, in many ways, behaves like phones costing many times its price.