Honor 8 Pro

8.5

Build Quality

9.0/10

Accessories

8.5/10

Audio

8.0/10

Display

8.5/10

Camera

8.5/10

Software & Features

8.0/10

Performance

9.0/10

Battery Life

8.5/10

Value

8.5/10

Pros

Great build quality
Comes with cardboard VR headset
Accurate & fast fingerprint scanner
Great 5.7-inch 1440p IPS display
Good rear camera
Excellent performance
Good battery life
Under RM 2000

Cons

No IP-rated dust and water resistant
No OIS
Battery drain with machine learning algorithm
Slow charging

Buy Honor 8 Pro

Camera

Honor Camera App

The camera app on the Honor devices and lower end Huawei devices are always overshadowed by their much superior camera app on the Huawei P & Mate series. Even if they share the same core components, but in terms of user experience, the premium smartphones have the better user control such as easy Pro mode.

Nonetheless, this is just my own personal opinion and there aren’t many people would use the Pro mode in real life anyway. In fact, the app itself is still very responsive and packs with all the important features for it to work.

First gen Huawei Dual Camera

Honor upgraded most of the components on the Honor 8 Pro except the camera module. The Dual 12-MP Monochrome & Colour sensors had remained the same as the Honor 8. Even the lens has the same f/2.2 aperture. The camera is not something I’d say inferior compared to the rest of the cameras in the market, but it just felt outdated when we compare it to Huawei/Honor’s own products.

Since there is no dedicated monochrome mode for Honor smartphones, the dual camera is only used for image sharpening and larger aperture mode. As a photographer myself, I’m not a fan of software emulated bokeh. As you can see from above image, that’s a fail from the software to differentiate glass and the actual background.

Image Quality

Like I said, the camera is still capable of churning out really good quality images even in low light situations with the f/2.2 aperture lens. Of course, we don’t expect it to perform magically well in the dark because, at ISO 3200, the photo is basically a noisy mess of grains.

One thing I like about Huawei/Honor’s camera is their colour profile. From my personal opinion, the colour reproduction is vivid and properly saturated, which gives a really striking impression especially when you photographing something colourful.