Huawei has a new Honor 8 Pro smartphone in tow and it packs impressive specifications worthy of a flagship, but at an affordable price point.
The Honor brand part of Huawei handles budget-friendly devices, aiming to deliver a good balance between quality and affordability. That said, generally, Honor smartphones are not exactly the most powerful flagships on the market, but they do pack plenty of oomph for their price points.
The new Honor 8 Pro, however, is both ultra-powerful and affordable, appearing as a more attractive option than the Huawei P10 flagship. Historically, there's been a quite well-defined line between the more premium Huawei smartphones and the budget Honor handsets, but the Honor 8 Pro now blurs that line and makes a better proposition both price and specs wise than the P10.
Huawei Honor 8 Pro: Flagship Specs On A Budget
The new Honor 8 Pro is launching in Europe at a cool £474 price point, which translates to roughly $591. At this price point, the smartphone comes with a 5.7-inch QHD display (2,560 x 1,440 pixels), an in-house Kirin 960 octa-core processor, a massive 6 GB of RAM, 64 GB of native storage (expandable), and the latest Huawei EMUI 5.1 build on top of Android 7.0 Nougat.
Other specs include a dual rear camera setup comprising of two 12-megapixel shooters, an 8-megapixel selfie cam, microSD support for additional storage of up to 128 GB, and a large 4,000 mAh battery that should last for up to two days with the Smart Power mode.
The Huawei Honor 8 Pro sports a sleek metal body, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, dual-SIM support, and 4G VoLTE connectivity, cat. 6 LTE and USB Type-C, among the highlights.
Honor 8 Pro Features
The smartphone also boasts a new camera feature called Highlights, developed in collaboration with GoPro, which works pretty much like HTC's Zoe Highlights feature that automatically creates video stories from the photos available in the gallery.
The Honor 8 Pro also taps machine learning for performance optimization, predicting users's daily routine to respond accordingly. For instance, the smartphone can anticipate when the user usually checks Facebook daily so it can have the app load faster than it would otherwise. Machine learning algorithms also aim to delay the slowdown a device inevitably faces over time, as file fragmentation and other wear and tear impact performance. The company touts that the Honor 8 Pro should still perform at 80 percent efficiency even after 500 days of use.
Honor 8 Pro Availability
The Honor 8 Pro is currently available for preorder from Huawei's VMall store at an introductory price of £474, which also bundles various accessories such as a tripod, memory card, powerbank, selfie stick and more. The smartphone will go on sale on April 20, when it will also hit Amazon, and it seems that the full price will be £545.98 ($681).
The company has yet to announce any details regarding the Honor 8 Pro pricing and release in the United States, but more information will likely become available shortly as Honor continues to expand its presence stateside.
