Honor 8X Review UK

Honor 8X Review: Overview & Price

The Honor 8X release date was back on October 16^th of 2018, in this Honor 8X review we will be going over what makes it special and showcasing some of the best Honor 8X deals in the UK.

The phone has superb battery life, strong performance and a nice design and display, offering huge value for money for users looking for a solid smartphone that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

The Honor 8X specs are impressive, offering plenty storage for those that love to store music and photos on their handset.

Priced at £229 in the UK, the phone really does look like a flagship device and can really catch your eye with its unique flash design.

Check out the best Honor 8X deals in the UK…

So what makes this phone special and a contender for the low-end smartphone users?

Let’s jump in and take a look…

Honor 8X Review: Design & Display

Upon taking the phone out of the box, you would really think it was an £800+ flagship device, Honor does an excellent job at this and almost all of their devices look like they have a lot higher price tag than they actually do.

So the actual design of the phone is an aluminium frame with glass front and back panels, we were surprised to see that Honor hasn’t taken the disco design look like they have with their Honor 10 or Honor View 20.

Nevertheless, the Honor 8X looks good and genuinely looks and feels a lot more premium than it is.

You may be wondering is the Honor 8X waterproof?

Well, unfortunately, the device doesn’t have an IP rating so be sure not to drop it in any water or this will damage the device.

This means that the Honor 8X is not waterproof.

Honor has also used a micro USB port instead of the more common USB-C.

On the back of the phone you will find the dual-camera setup which looks like two small portholes in the top left-hand corner.

Then in the centre of the device, you will find the fingerprint sensor, which is placed perfectly for your finger to naturally gravitate towards.

Along the right-hand side is where you will find the volume rocker, power button and then over to the left you will find the dual-nano SIM and microSD tray, which allows you to expand the internal storage up to 400GB.

At the base of the phone is where you will find the 3.5mm headphone jack alongside the questionable micro-USB port for charging the device.

The Honor 8X comes in a range of different colours; Black, Red, Blue and Pink, all looking equally as nice as each other, we had the pleasure of reviewing the Red phone.

Because of the glass body on the back of the phone, you will find that it is literally a magnet for fingerprints, so we definitely recommend investing in a case or a skin for the phone.

The Honor 8X has a beautiful 6.5-inch Full HD IPS LCD display with a small notch which can be hidden in the settings.

The display literally dominates the whole front of the phone, so it’s awesome for watching media like YouTube and Netflix.

The display has 1080 x 2340 resolution with a clean 397 pixels per inch, making everything look extremely sharp and crisp.

It has a 19.5:9 aspect ratio, making your media experience extremely pleasant, we found ourselves watching back-to-back ‘the big bang theory’ for 2 hours.

The display has an auto-brightness setting, which will adjust the settings in the phone automatically to suit the amount of ambient light, for example at night the display will brighten up a little and when in broad daylight you’ll find the display becoming a little less bright.

This makes it extremely efficient at saving battery, meaning you can conserve as much battery as possible to keep you running all day.

You can adjust the colour temperature too if you find the colours are a little bright for your liking.

There is an eye-comfort mode, which essentially reduces the amount of blue light that the display emits to protect your eyes when using the phone for long periods of time, again this can be turned on or off in the settings.

The display is great and we had no issues with it at all, ideal for those who love to game on their device.

Honor 8X Review: Performance

The Honor 8X specs are exactly what you would expect from a device at this price points, its good but its not excellent.

Powering the phone is a Kirin 710 chipset, which has eight CPU cores, meaning that the phone does have some pretty good horsepower.

Coupled with 4GB of RAM, which is the minimum we expect from any good performing handset, it allows the phone to scroll effortlessly through applications and the UI.

For every day use the performance will be fine and run smoothly without any lag or interference.

Scrolling through social media and watching media on the phone is a breeze.

We tested the phone out on a couple of games, first being Runescape and we found it to run just fine in medium graphical settings, when we bumped it up to higher settings we found the fps to slow down and the game slowed down a little bit.

That being said this is a graphically demanding game and for the most part, games ran just fine without any hiccups.

The Honor 8X has a generous 64GB of storage, as previously mentioned this is expandable up to 400GB for those who take tons of images and like to download movies, but for the most part, 64GB will be just fine for the average user.

The performance overall was impressive when we looked at the phone on the Honor 8X release date. But, it’s not a performance powerhouse which can handle extremely intense games for hours.

Expect to see a few dropped frames especially when running more demanding games in higher settings.

But for the most part, we were impressed with how it handles game from the play store, and the average user won’t have any problem in this department.

The Honor 8X runs from Android 8.1 which was previously the most up to date Android, it also has Huawei’s EMUI which is one of the more pleasant UI’s in handsets to date.

It offers lots of customisations to the phone such as an application page and adjusting your home screen.

There are some cool features such as party mode which lets you instantly share your favourite music with friends who also use an Honor phone.

Karaoke mode lets you record the sound of your singing and play it back so you can practice or have some fun with it, we didn’t use this feature but its cool to use now and again for a good laugh.

Generally, the UI feels smooth and clean, we loved the fact we could customise our home screen to suit our personal preference, and there are lots of cool features to play around and have some fun with too.

Honor 8X Review: Camera

The Honor 8X has a strong 20MP front lens, which is backed up by a 2MP depth sensor, bringing out more detail when in portrait mode and bokeh mode.

Unfortunately, there is no image stabilisation here but that is to be expected, however, there is AI scene recognition.

This uses AI to detect the scene that you have taken a photo in, and it adjusts the settings accordingly to try and produce the best quality image possible.

This is down to personal preference though as sometimes we found ourselves not agreeing with the AI so we would turn the scene recognition setting off in the settings to get a more natural un-edited look.

See Related:

*Honor Play Review*
*Honor 20 Pro Review*
*Honor View 20 Review*
*Honor View 10 Review*

The ultra-low light mode is extremely impressive, as it will draw in as much ambient light as possible and be able to produce some stunning images even with little to no light at all.

Generally though in good lighting conditions the Honor 8X camera is great and able to produce highly detailed images, especially when in portrait mode, however we did notice slight shutter lag which can become slightly annoying if you need to take a quick snap of something.

Dynamic range is good and contrast is strong too, we found ourselves thoroughly enjoying the quality of the camera and were more than happy with its overall performance.

Phase detection autofocus is supported on this phone too, which will automatically focus in on what you’re taking a photo of extremely quickly, this helps when trying to capture shots of flying birds or moving cars.

We did find the camera to be rather artificial and sometimes would over saturate some of our images even with the AI mode turned off.

Around the front you will find a 16MP selfie camera, which is generous and supports portrait mode to ensure you get an Instagram worth photo without needing any fancy editing skills or too much work.

There is a beauty mode, which can sometimes make you, look a little bit like a Barbie doll, but for the most part it does well to smooth the tone of your skin and even everything out.

Pro mode also allows you to manually adjust the parameters of the image yourself, ensuring you get an already sized image to your personal preference.

Video recording on the Honor 8X is decent and records at up to 1080p resolution with 30fps, this allows you to capture some high-quality video footage without much effort.

However there is no image stabilisation, so if you are planning on using the phone for this purpose, we recommend a tripod or an extremely steady hand!

Honor 8X Review: Battery Life

The Honor 8X has a 3750mAh battery, which is towards the higher end of the scale.

This is needed due to the huge phablet like display. Following the Honor 8X release date, Honor said it has an intelligent power saving mode, which allows the phone to get up to 33% more battery life.

The phone will easily last you for a full day and more; of course this is dependent on the individual usage of the phone.

Gamers will find themselves reaching for the charger sooner and those who watch movies and lots of YouTube videos may want to take a charger with them if they are going out all day.

That being said when testing the phone we used social media, watched 5 or 6 YouTube videos and even played a couple of hours gaming and still found ourselves with 40% charge at the end of the day.

The downside to the Honor 8X is that it uses a micro-USB for charging, which is massively outdated and we would have loved to have seen a USB-C, there is also no wireless or fast charging supported on this phone.

Honor 8X Review: Summary

So is the Honor 8X worth your money?

Well if you’re someone looking for a cheaper alternative to some of the more expensive flagships out there, then yes.

It has a stunning huge LCD display, ideal for media and gaming, coupled with a super-efficient chipset which can ensure the battery get you through a full day of intense usage.

The attractive and premium looking design is great and really does catch the eye, that being said there are other phones out there which offer a lot of what the Honor 8X does.

Now because the Honor 8X is not waterproof, you will need to be very careful when using the phone around water, as if you submerge the phone it will surely damage.

We recommend checking out our Moto G6 review and comparing the two devices.

The Honor 8X specs are decent, but they are not going to blow you away with power, plenty of storage is a strong point but gamers may want to reconsider.

Honor 8X Dual SIM, 64 GB storage, 20 MP Dual Camera and 6.5 Inch Full View Display, UK Official Device - Black 

The value for money on this phone is huge, with 64GB of internal storage, which is expandable up to, 400GB and a solid camera, what more would you want for a handset that costs £229.

We hope you have enjoyed our Honor 8x review and feel free to leave a comment and check out the best Honor 8X contract deals in the UK at the top of this post.

Honor 8X Review: Full Specification

Launch: 2018, September

Body:

• Dimension: 160.4 x 76.6 x 7.8mm (6.31 x 3.02 x 0.31 inches)
• Weight: 175g (6.17 oz)
• Build: Front/back glass, aluminium frame
• Sim: Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)

Display:

• Type: LTPS IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colours
• Size: 6.5 inches, 103.2 cm² (-84.0% screen-to-body-ratio)
• Resolution: 1080 x 2340 pixels, 19.5:9 ratio (-397 ppi density)
• Protection: Corning Gorilla Glass 3

Platform:

• OS: Android 8.1 (Oreo); EMUI 8.2
• Chipset: HiSilicon Kirin 710 (12nm)
• CPU: Octa-core (4×2.2 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4×1.7 GHz Cortex-A53)
• GPU: Mali-G51 MP4

Memory:

• Card slot: microSD, up to 400GB (dedicated slot)
• Internal: 64/128GB, 6GB RAM or 64GB, 4GB RAM

Camera:

• Primary:
  – 20MP, f/1.8, 27mm (wide), PDAF
  – 2MP depth sensor
• Features: LED flash, panorama, HDR
• Video: 1080p@30/60fps, 480fps, stereo sound recording
• Secondary:
  – 16MP, f/2.0, 26mm (wide)
• Features: HDR
• Video: 1080p@30fps

Sound:

• Loudspeaker: Yes
• 3.5mm Jack: Yes
  – Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic

Comms:

• WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Hotspot
• Bluetooth: 4.2, A2DP, LE, aptX
• GPS: Yes, with A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
• NFC: Yes
• USB: microUSB 2.0, USB on-the-go

Features:

• Sensors: Fngerprint (rear-mounted), accelerometer, gyro, proxmity, compass
  – Charging 5V/2A 10W

Battery:

• Non-removeable Li-Pro 3750 mAh battery

Misc:

• Colours: Black, Red, Pink, Blue
• Price: As seen in above post

Tests:

• Performance: Basemark OS ||: 2493 / Basemark OS || 2.0: 2341 / Basemark X: 20416
• Display: Contrast ratio: 1234:1 (nominal), 3.113 (sunlight)
• Camera: Photo / Video
• Loudspeaker: Voice 67dB / Noise 72dB / Ring 81dB
• Audi Quality: Noise -92.3dB / Crosstalk -80.7dB
• Battery life: Endurance rating 96h