Dual Lens camera

Honor 8 launched with Honor 8 smart & Holly 3 in India

by with No Comment HuaweiTechnewz

Honor recently launched its flagship device Honor 8 after its 2nd anniversary in India. The special feature of the phone is the Dual Lens camera(not Leica) at the back similar to Huawei P9. Along with Honor 8, the company also launched Honor 8 smart and Honor Holly 3 which is its first phone that is “Made in India”.  Let us go through the specifications of all the latest devices from Honor.

Read more: Honor 5C hands on review

Honor 8 launched with Honor 8 smart & Holly 3 in India

Honor 8 launched with Honor 8 smart & Holly 3 in India

Honor 8 – The new flagship

Honor 8 has a cool new design with 2.5D glass on both sides – front & rear(15 layers) and rounded sides. The phone becomes slippery and a fingerprint magnet with the added beauty of the glass. The placement of the buttons and ports is quite standard. It has a USB type C reversible port for charging and data syncing. With the full HD screen of 5.2 inches, it touches that sweet spot making it easy to use with one hand. The one thing that is amazing about the design is the flat rear despite of the dual lens camera and the fingerprint sensor. The phone weighs 153g. It comes in three color variants viz. Sapphire Blue(The Best), Pearl White and Sunrise Gold. Overall I am pretty happy about the design changes Honor made in its new Flagship device.

 

Honor 8 comes with 16 nm Kirin 950 chipset which reduces the power consumption of the device. It has an octa-core processor(4×2.53GHz+4×1.8GHz) with 4GB of RAM and 32GB(22GB user available) ROM which is expandable up to 128GB using micro SD card(dedicated slot). For the graphics it has Mali-T880 GPU. The AnTuTu benchmark score for Honor 8 device was 89,948. Now the sad part is that it has single Nano SIM(4G LTE) support which can be a deal breaker for many Indian users especially with JIO out there. Plus none of the Honor phones still have VoLTE support which is something that needs some serious attention.  As for the software is concerned, Honor 8 runs on Android 6.0 marshmallow with EMUI 4.1 which is exactly the same as on Honor 5C. I actually hoped to see some changes in the software too.

Honor 8 launched with Honor 8 smart & Holly 3 in India

Coming to the main feature of this phone i.e. camera, it has 12MP dual lens(Monochrome+Color RGB – f2.2) rear camera with dual-tone LED flash.  The front shooter is of 8MP with f2.4 aperture. The dual lens gives the image more depth of field while taking in more light to give some nice shots in low light. But some samples do indicate that the light intake also introduces a lot of noise while taking pictures in low light conditions. Instead you can use the low-light mode to show pics in darker condition to get better output than auto mode. The professional or the manual mode gives you a lot of freedom to play with the camera controls depending on the scenario you are trying to shoot. You can shoot full HD videos at 30 fps using both rear and front cameras, unfortunately you don’t have OIS support which is offered by other phones in this segment . Well I would like to say that Honor did really great job by introducing dual lens for this price segment, thumbs up for the camera feature(If we keep the missing OIS aside).

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As far as other feature goes, Honor 8 has NFC support(also for payments) along with infrared LED(remote control). It has dual antennas with auto switching based on the best reception. Same thing follows up with Wifi+ too as it will prefer 5GHz over 2.4GHz till it can offer greater speeds. Talking about the fingerprint sensor, it works quite well and is quick to respond. There are various smart features associated with the fingerprint sensor like taking photos, making payments, record videos, receive calls, snooze the alarm, and it can work as a smart key too for apps. Screenshots can be taken by tapping knuckle on the sensor. The packaging of the Honor 8 is done in an eco-friendly box which is again a good thing. The device has a 3000mAh battery(rated – 2900mAh) which supports fast charging(47% in 30mins) and full charge takes up to 90 mins. The charger rating is of 9V 2A. Honor is providing you with 2 years of warranty for the device, 6 months for the accessories and 3 months for touch screen replacement. That is some confidence they are showing with that extra 1-year warranty which is not very common.

The phone is priced at Rs.29,999 which is a bit high if consider the specifications or if we compare it with its competitor OnePlus 3. Though it has a dual lens camera, it lacks dual SIM & VoLTE support. I would say that there is going to be a tough fight between Honor 8, Zenfone 3 and OnePlus 3 out of which OnePlus 3 wins. You can always consider Honor 8 for its dual lens camera and compact body.

Honor 8 smart

Honor 8 smart has a 5.2 inch full HD screen with Kirin 650 chip clocked at 2GHz. It has 2 GB RAM and 16GB ROM with expandable storage. The rear camera is of 13MP(stack sensor Sony IMX214) and the front is of 8MP both single lens. It runs on Android 6.0 with EMUI 4.1 and has a battery capacity of 3000mAh. The color choices include black, white, gold and the phone will be available for Rs.19,999.

Honor Holly 3

Honor Holly 3 has a 5.5 inch HD display with a plastic back and metal on the sides. It weighs 168g and is 8.45mm in thickness. It runs on Kirin 620 octa-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and has 2GB RAM. 16GB ROM(expandable up to128GB). It is again a single SIM(4G) device that runs on Android 6.0+EMUI 4.1. Honor Holly 3 has 3100mAh battery and micro USB port. The color variants include black, white, gold and the Holly 3 would be sold at a price of Rs.9,999.

Well out of these three phones, I didn’t get why someone would go for Honor 8 smart that has only 2GB of RAM by spending 19,999 INR. Also the Holly 3 has some pretty good competitions with Redmi Note 3, and LeTV Le 2. I think the company needs to work more on the price point of view to give some tough competition to the other brands,

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Honor 5C hands on review

by with 3 Comments HuaweiReviews

Huawei’s Honor C series comes with smartphones that are targeted in the low budget segment. The recent phone in this budget was the Honor 5C that is priced at Rs.10,999. The specs are decent but there are a lot of tough competitors in this price bracket. Let us do the Honor 5C hands on review and find out if it is worth buying.

Honor 5C hands on review

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Design – 7.5/10

Honor 5C comes with a brushed aluminium finish on the back and has a tough build. On the right, there is the power button, volume rocker while the SIM tray is on the left. Micro USB port is at the bottom along with the speaker grills. The 3.5 mm audio jack is on the top with secondary noise cancellation microphone. On the back we have the camera and the fingerprint sensor. The placement of the components is pretty much common like in the other devices. The phone weighs 156g in weight and has a good one hand grip. The only bad thing about this device in terms of design is the thick bezel on the front. The bezel steals away all the beauty of the phone’s display. This is not the case with its rival Le 2, which has an amazing design. I am not much impressed by Honor 5C in terms of look but the phone’s build is all strong and you can definitely rely on it.

Display – 8/10

Honor 5C has a 5.2 inch full HD display which feels perfect when you hold the phone with one hand. Now there is no Gorilla glass protection on this device so you may need to put on a tempered glass or scratch guard at least. The absence of screen protection on this device is really confusing, but I have been using this device for long now and even with rough usage I had no issues with the screen. The display is vibrant and bright to beat its competitor Le 2 but fails by a thin line when it comes to color reproduction and crispness. The touch works just fine with no issues as such. The 3 navigation buttons are onscreen.

Performance – 7.5/10

Coming to the key feature that is the performance, Honor 5C comes with a Kirin 650 octa-core processor(Quadcore A53 clocked at 2.0GHz + Quadcore A53 clocked at 1.7GHz) which uses the 16nm technology for greater performance and lesser battery consumption. Well, I am not just reading out the lines from Wikipedia but it all proves to be true. It has only 2GB RAM and 16GB internal memory with expandable storage up to 256GB using the SIM slot 2. Now this is one drawback that the phone only has 2GB of RAM,  but in actual use the hardware and software performs so great together to mask it. The benchmark score didn’t come out to be good, but the performance is shockingly impressive may be due to the Kirin 650 16nm technology. So for the normal apps and multitasking, you don’t need to worry about. It runs on Mali T830 which also does a good job of running most of the games, but in some games like N.O.V.A. 3 there is a frame drop every now and then. Also, the phone doesn’t heat up much while gaming which is a good thing. If this smartphone had like extra 1 GB of RAM, it would be just unbeatable.

Honor 5C comes with Android 6.0 i.e. Marshmallow running out of the box with EMUI 4.1 running on top of it. It doesn’t have an app drawer, even though I like their UI as it’s pretty clean and simple. There are some default features which you can enjoy like screen recording, scrolling screenshots etc. Plus you can use the fingerprint sensor for multiple things like pulling the notification panel, swipe through photos, attend calls, click pictures etc.

You are Reading: Honor 5C hands on review

Camera – 8/10

Honor 5C has an amazing camera quality with 13 MP rear shooter and 8 MP front facing camera. It has single LED which does a decent job. One of the best features of the phone’s camera is the focusing – tap to focus. I was easily able to focus on a spider’s web. Another great feature that you must try is the light painting/graffiti mode. Just put your phone on a tripod, turn off the lights, grab a torch and start painting in the air. It can basically take long exposure shots with added enhancement. I must say that Honor 5C has one of the best cameras in this budget till now.

Scroll at the last for the camera samples

Connectivity and Sound – 7/`10

The phone has Dual nano sim slot with 4G VoLTE support. Other common connectivity options available are Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. One major thing missing is the OTG support and they have also dropped the Gyro sensor. The fingerprint sensor works like a charm on this device and is pretty quick. The speakers on this device are decent too with nice quality and medium audio level output.

Battery – 7.5/10

Honor 5C has a 3000mAh battery and due to the Kirin 650 chipset, it has an amazing battery backup. I could easily last a day with moderate usage over 4G. It doesn’t support fast charging and charges at a normal rate 0-100 takes like 2 and half hours.

Availability and pricing

Honor 5C is available on their official online honor store for Rs.10,999. The color options available are Gold, Grey, and Silver.

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Everything you need to know about Honor 5C

by with No Comment HuaweiReviewsTechnewz

Honor today officially launched the Honor 5C smartphone in India which is powered by the Kirin 650 – 16nm processor. This time, the focus is on the performance as it was launched with the hashtag ‘Dare to perform’. We got a chance to experience the smartphone and here is what we think about it. Let us check out the specifications and features of Honor 5C.

R-L, P. Sanjeev, Director Sales (Devices Business), Huawei India; Allen Wang, Consumer Business Group, Huawei India and Vignesh Ramakrishnana, Director Mobile – Flipkart

Commenting on the launch, Mr. Allen Wang of Consumer Business Group, Huawei India, said, “Honor smartphones are for the brave, people who are discerning and look to get the best in class and most innovative product and have a flair to keep up with their fast paced life. After the success of Honor 5X earlier this year, we are excited to introduce Honor 5c in Indian market and we are hopeful that we would continue to receive a great response from our consumers.

“Honor has always taken a lead in technology innovation and puts quality first. In the era of price wars we focus on quality over price and thrive on packaging together technology that make a product which has an edge in the market. Honor 5c features the much faster Kirin 650 16nm processor which is the first of its kind in this segment and will offer supreme performance to its users. India is a very significant market for Honor and with these persistent series of innovation, we would like to reiterate our commitment to the Indian consumers and offer upgraded experience with every launch”, added Allen Wang.

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Honor 5C Specifications and features:

Honor 5C has this aluminum alloy body which gives it a premium look. On the back, it has the 13MP camera with LED flash, fingerprint sensor, and the Honor logo. The power button and the volume rockers are on the right with hybrid SIM card slot on the left. On the top, there is the 3.5mm audio jack with Micro USB port and speaker grill at the bottom of the phone. The phone does have a premium design and weighs 156g. It has a 5.2 inch full HD display with 1920×1080 pixel resolution (423 PPI). The three navigation buttons are on-screen and there is no separate touch capacitive alternative.

It runs on Kirin 650 16nm octa-core (4 Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz + 4 Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2GHz) 64-bit processor with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. For the graphics, it comes with Mali-T830 GPU which will surely improve the gaming performance. The internal memory can be expanded up to 128GB using a memory card but you will have to compromise the dual sim capability as the card slot is hybrid. Overall the performance has increased and with use of Kirin 650 processor and the power consumption will be reduced. In failed to impress much in the AnTuTu benchmark test with a score of 53050. We need to test the gaming performance with this phone to find out the real strength of the hardware. On the software side, it has Android 6.0 Marshmallow running with their own EMUI 4.1 operating system.

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Honor 5C comes with 13MP rear shooter with BSI sensor and single LED flash. On the front, it has got 8MP camera again with BSI sensor improving the performance in the low light conditions. Honor has mostly focused on the manual mode that lets you adjust the shutter speed, focal length, exposure time and such advanced features. You can play with that and do light painting too which is a must try feature. Smartimage 3.0 image processor also provides you with creative filters, shooting modes and 10 different beauty modes. You can get all creative with the camera of this phone.

AnTuTu Benchmark Test:

Camera Sample shots:

For the connectivity, it comes with Wifi, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, Dual SIM(4G LTE) and USB OTG support too. The fingerprint sensor 2.0 is very easy to calibrate and works great but not the fastest I have seen. Honor also plans to use the fingerprint sensor for scrolling and as a button too giving it an additional advantage. The speaker grills are at the bottom and has a decent audio level. The phone comes with a 3000mAh non-removable battery and with the new processor, it will use the power efficiently thus increasing the battery life.

Honor 5C is priced at Rs.10,999 for which the prebookings have already started on Flipkart and Honor official store. It comes in three color variants that are gold, silver, and grey. The flash sales will start on 30th June and the next one on 7th July at 14 00 hrs. So go ahead and register yourself accordingly. The phone will surely have tough competition with other smartphones like the Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 2. Let us know if you have any doubts about this smartphone through the comment section below.

Along with Honor 5C, they also showcased a tablet Honor T1 which has 7-inch display with 1024×600 pixel resolution. It has the Spreadtrum SC7731G A7 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz. It comes with 4100 mAh battery which offers 20hrs of 3G calling and 12hrs of video experience. It is priced at Rs.6,999 and is available on Flipkart.

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Huawei Honor 4X Full Review

by with No Comment HuaweiMobileReviewsTechnology

Huawei Honor 4X is a low budget device announced last year which has some great specifications. One of the most astonishing feature of Honor 4X is the back camera. It is capable of taking some very nice HD shots. Lets take a full review and see the specs in detail.

Design

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Honor 4X comes in two color white and black with a textured back. This texture gives a nice grip of phone and makes it feel sturdy. At the back we have a Honor Logo printed neatly along with camera on the top left corner. On the right there is power button with volume rockers which i feel is the best position for easy access. 3.5 mm audio jack is on the top with noise cancellation microphone. Speaker grill, microphone and micro USB port are present at the bottom. The three navigation keys does not have backlight support, which can be a issue when you operate the device in dark. The device feels light (weight-170 g) with respect to the size and the weight is uniformly distributed.

Screen

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Honor 4X has a 5.5 inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 which is about 267 ppi pixel density. The screen looks decent in terms of pixel density. The touch on this device is fairly responsive, you can try a matte finish screen guard to improve it. There is no Gorilla glass protection so that’s an alarming sign, you better get a anti-fingerprint screen guard on to avoid scratches and fingerprint marks. The screen supports a 10 point multi-touch. Huawei has done average work on the screen but again introducing a decent 5.5 inch phone in this budget is a challenge.

Performance

Honor 4X comes with a Quad-core MSM8916 64 bit processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. It has 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB internal storage out of which around 4 GB is user available. It supports up to 32 GB of external storage via memory card. We faced no issues while multitasking and heavy usage due to the huge amount of RAM available. The gaming performance on this device was also great with Adreno 306 GPU processor. We tried playing several games like temple run 2, My daddy was a thief, Asphalt 8, Dead Trigger 2, Marvel contest of champions, and Modern combat 5 which all worked with no lag even at high graphics. But when we tried playing N.O.V.A. 3, the device failed to run it properly. So you can play most of the games except a very few high end games. The Antutu benchmark score on this device was 20304, while Nenamark 2 calculated a score of 51.9 fps.

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Honor 4X comes with Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) running out of the box. There is no news of Lollipop update yet. Huawei has their own Emoticon UI 3.0 (EMUI 3.0) based on KitKat. One thing that I liked about Honor 4x is that, it comes with almost no bloatware (pre-installed apps) that gives you the freedom. Some other features include smart assistance like motion control, One-hand UI, smart cover etc. You can also restrict the data usage for each app separately by going in settings -> Networked Apps.

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Below are some screenshots of the Emoticon UI 3.0 giving a whole overview.

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Camera

The device has a 13 MP rear camera that comes with Sony 2nd generation BSI/OV sensor. With this sensor, the device is able to take some nice snaps even in low light condition. The resolution of the photo is 4208 x 3120 pixels, and auto focusing is quite accurate. The quality of image captured with the camera is quite impressive and you can count on it. The camera app has some additional features like panorama, HDR, Audio note, Best Photo, All-Focus, and Watermark. Coming to video recording, it can record HD videos at 720P.

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The front camera is of 5 MP(2592 x 1944) which can be used to capture great selfies. While taking a selfie, the camera app shows a cropped image of face on the top-right corner so that your eyes are on the lens. The only bug that i encountered in Honor 4X camera is that, in certain conditions the auto white balance turned the image yellowish. To solve this problem you can change the white balance from auto to incandescent.  Below are some of the shots captured using Honor 4X camera.

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Connectivity and Sound

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Honor 4X supports dual SIM and that too both LTE (4G + 4G) so you can enjoy high speed internet. Apart from that you have some common connectivity options like WIFI, Bluetooth v4.0, and GPS. Unfortunately the device does not support USB OTG feature so you cannot connect a USB drive. This is one disappointing thing in Honor 4X as it has low internal storage.

Bottom

Bottom

The speakers on the device are located at the bottom with 6 neatly drilled wholes. The Sound on Honor 4X is decent i.e. not too high or too low but the clarity is good. This will enhance your gaming and movie watching experience.

Battery

The device has a 3000 mAh non-removable battery which is quite sufficient for a 5.5 inch phone. The battery can last for half day with heavy usage and more than a day with normal usage. You can also use power saving options to conserve battery power. It supports LTE on both SIM and may consume more battery on 4G which is still to be tested.

Warranty and Availability

The device is exclusively available through Flipkart in white and black color variant for Rs. 10,499. The manufacturer warranty for device is 15 months, for battery it is 6 months and for accessories its 3 months. You also get various attractive offers while buying the phone.

Overall the phone is worth a buy at this price range. For the people who want a phone with good camera quality this can be an amazing choice. For others who need more performance you can try other alternatives like MI 4i which is a little higher in terms of price. Let me know if you have any doubts or feedback regarding the review through the comment section below.