Honor 8X review: the best mid-range smartphone currently?

The X series from Honor has always included mid-range smartphones with a very good price-performance ratio. For a good two weeks I took the latest smartphone from this series, the Honor 8X, under the microscope and was able to find out whether this smartphone lives up to its predecessors.

Unboxing and initial setup

I already documented the unboxing and initial setup of the Honor 8X in its own article. Here's a quick run-through: If you lift the turquoise lid of the packaging, you are immediately greeted by the smartphone itself. Underneath is a small cardboard case with a clear cover, a SIM tool and some instructions. Again underneath, Honor put the power supply unit and the charging cable.

Setting up the Honor 8X is quite simple and hardly time-consuming. All you have to do is agree to the terms and conditions of Huawei, Honor's parent company, log in with your Google account, optionally enter your own Huawei ID, select the unlocking method and restore a possible cloud backup. Overall, this one lasted for me Proprocess about 20 minutes.

Design and workmanship

For a price of 250 euros, the Honor 8X is surprisingly well made and looks very good at the same time. The front and back are made of glass and are connected with an aluminum frame. The smartphone is only 7,8 millimeters thick and weighs 175 grams. Due to the small thickness, you can also use the smartphone prouse it with a case without any problems - it fits the hand very well either way. The device is available in black, blue and red, although I chose the black version.

Like the front, the back of the Honor 8X is made of glass (Image: TechnikNews)

Let's start with the back. Honor has come up with something very nice here and has given almost the entire left half a slightly lighter stripe, which makes this part stand out from the rest of the back. Because the back is made of glass, you have to expect smeared glass if you don't use a case. Otherwise there is an Honor logo, the "AI Camera" lettering, the flash, the dual camera and a fingerprint sensor on the back. The latter unlocks the device with just a short tap with the stored finger - and it's lightning fast, as you're used to from Huawei and Honor. Alternatively, you can unlock your Honor 8X using face recognition. This only works via the front camera and is not as secure as, for example, Face ID, which creates a 3D image of the face and therefore cannot be fooled with a simple photo of the smartphone owner. Unlocking the Honor 8X with facial recognition worked very well for me in good light - with or without glasses. In bad light, however, this method had its merits Prostated problems.

The Honor 8X can also be unlocked using history recognition (Image: TechnikNews)

The power button and the volume control are on the right side of the Honor 8X. The microUSB port for charging, a speaker and a jack plug were installed below. USB-C would certainly have been more practical than microUSB for most people here. However, I don't have any Proproblem as all my gadgets are still charged through this plug. Unfortunately, the speaker completely disappointed me. If I didn't accidentally cover it umpteen times, it just didn't sound earth-shattering. On the left side of the smartphone there is only the slot for a microSD card and two nano-SIMs. Honor only installed a small microphone at the top.

Almost the entire front of the Honor 8X is taken up by the display (picture: TechnikNews)

Almost the entire front is taken up by the display. At the top there is only a small notch for the earpiece and the front camera and the chin at the bottom was also very small. If desired, the notch can be hidden via the software, which I didn't do in the end, as it hardly bothered me anyway because of its small size. In addition, it is automatically hidden during video playback anyway, which is the most important thing from my point of view. Two or three words about the front camera: This has a resolution of 16 megapixels and takes usable photos in good light. When taking pictures in the dark, however, these can then be washed out very quickly. The display itself is 6,5 inches, based on IPS and has a resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels. Overall, I really liked the screen. The colors are very good for the low price of the Honor 8X and individual pixels cannot be recognized either.

Specifications

Honor installed the HiSilicon Kirin 8 octa-core processor in the 710XProprocessor. This scored 139.427 points in the Antutu benchmark. In Geekbench comes this one Prozessor to a single-core score of 1660 points and a multi-core score of 5622 points. The performance was always sufficient for my purposes - apps always opened very quickly and there were almost never any delays in operation. The only thing I noticed very often was stuttering in animations, which I think is due to the EMUI. But I will come to this in more detail later. For the graphics unit, Honor opted for the Mali-G51, which is also supported by the manufacturer's own "GPU Turbo" technology. "GPU Turbo" should allow games to run better and the battery not to drain so quickly. Whether that was really the case in the end, I can't judge. All I can say is that games like Asphalt 9 or Oceanhorn run on high quality without Proproblems ran.

The internal memory is 64 or 128 gigabytes in size, depending on the choice, whereby I opted for the configuration with 64 gigabytes of internal memory. However, this can optionally be expanded with a microSD card. At the moment, Android and various apps only take up 22 gigabytes for me. The main memory is 4 gigabytes and is sufficient for daily use and multitasking.

The built-in battery has a capacity of 3750mAh. During my test phase, I was usually able to achieve a day of stand-by time with mostly six and a half hours, if not seven or eight hours, of screen on time. These values ​​are really impressive for a mid-range smartphone. After a day or two, the Honor 8X had to be plugged in again. Honor specifies charging times of 150 minutes since it does not support Quick-Charge. In the end, a charging cycle with the supplied charger usually lasted 120 minutes for me.

Software

The Honor 8X runs Android 8.1 with EMUI 8.2. An update to Android 9 Pie with the EMUI 9 however, has already been verseprochen. The bottom line is that the software only convinced me halfway.

The design of the launcher and UI is basically very nice. But there are parts where you think they were copied from iOS. This includes the folder design in the launcher, the shape of the icons of the system apps and the appearance of the start page of the settings. Unfortunately, a lot of bloatware was also preinstalled, most of which I uninstalled immediately. I also wonder why there is a separate mirror app in which you can just look at yourself via the front camera (WTF?). Fortunately, this can also be uninstalled.

I mentioned earlier that I noticed jerky animations while using the device. For example, it was very often the case that the notification center did not open completely, so that I had to help with another swipe. I was only moderately enthusiastic about the structure of the settings, as they are far too confusing in my opinion.

All in all, I'm already looking forward to Android 9 Pie with the EMUI 9, as this software runs much smoother according to the first testers. In addition, Huawei managed to drastically reduce the number of menus in the settings.

Camera

The Honor 8X has a dual camera, the sensors of which have a resolution of 20 megapixels and 2 megapixels. The 20 megapixel sensor has an aperture of f / 1.8 and is used for all normal shots. The second sensor is responsible for collecting depth information and is therefore only used in portrait mode.

In AI mode, the software improves the images (screenshot: TechnikNews)

Photos taken with normal mode in good light look really good and rich in detail. Even when zooming in, hardly any details are lost for a long time. For the normal mode there is the AI ​​mode as an aid. Then the recordings are additionally improved by the software. For example: I want to photograph a sunset using AI mode. The software recognizes that it is a sunset and automatically increases the saturation so that the colors stand out more. The same goes for pets, food or similar things.

The previously mentioned portrait mode is suitable for taking pictures of individual people. This spits out very good results even at first glance. When you zoom in, however, you notice that the corners of the subject in the photo are usually slightly blurred. When photographing my cat in portrait mode, I also noticed that only the face is in focus, but not the whole body.

The night mode, with which several pictures are taken at once with different exposures, did not convince me at all. All recordings were very noisy here. Then there's that Promode, where you can make adjustments to the picture yourself. I never used additional modes like "light painting" or the individual filters.

Summary and Conclusion

As always, I want to first skim over the things that I really liked about the Honor 8X. First there is the design itself with the good handling of the device and the large display, which was able to reproduce a very good picture at all times. The reliable fingerprint sensor is definitely a bonus on this smartphone. Then I noticed positively that there is space for two SIM cards and a microSD card in the slot on the side. Something that you no longer see everywhere today. It continues with the performance, which also convinced me very much. There were almost no stutters or delays. I also can't say anything bad about the battery life and the screen-on-time of up to eight hours.

Go on with the things that I liked only partially or not at all. First there is the speaker, which I cover very often and which doesn't sound very good either. Right next to it is the microUSB connector. I didn't have any Proproblem, but some people might be bothered by the fact that Honor still hasn't decided on USB-C. The charging times are then connected to the plug, which at 120 minutes is really too long by today's standards. EMUI only partially agreed with me. One reason for this: I really don’t think installing bloatware is necessary anymore in 2018. The only thing I didn't like about the camera was the night mode, as it makes all the recordings noisy. Maybe an update will help here.

All in all, the Honor 8X wasn't a bad investment from my point of view. All of my negative points are just things that you can come to terms with after a while. Is it the best mid-range smartphone right now? Maybe not quite. Other smartphones in this performance class already have a USB-C connector or Stock Android, for example, which definitely runs more smoothly than Android with the EMUI. However, if you still have devices with microUSB and are a fan of EMUI, you can safely use the Honor 8X. Is it a worthy successor to the Honor 7X? Definitely!

Prices and availability

The Honor 8X is available from Honor's online shop, from Amazon and from various retailers, such as MediaMarkt. For the 64-gigabyte variant, an MSRP of 250 euros is called, for the 128-gigabyte option even around 280 euros are due.

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