Let's start with a little background: Honor is a sub-brand of Huawei, under which the company launches devices aimed at a younger audience, which really just means lower cost. Technically, they could be inferior to their brothers from the main line, and in terms of design they were far from what Huawei did with its flagships with the letter "P".
The company itself is not very fond of comparing smartphones of two brands head-on, arguing that it is a difference in philosophy - they say, Honor is a different company, with its own standards and approach to what a modern smartphone is. But in reality, of course, the devices overlap. I always thought the engineers Honor - is in some sense the students their colleagues from the main unit Huawei's. They looked at the "big" flagships, adopted experience and for a long time did the same thing, only not so successfully.
The shift happened last year, when the Honor 8 turned out to be so good that it was a real competitor to the P9: here you have a dual camera, and the performance is excellent, and even the design, although it has a persistent apple aroma, was generally a success (especially in blue).
Now, when I have two Huawei smartphones for testing - Honor 8 Pro and the P10 presented with fanfare in Russia, I am a little confused. 8 Pro is not only competitive, it evokes a strong feeling that the students have surpassed their teachers in many ways.
The Honor 8 Pro doesn't just echo the iPhone 7 Plus in many ways - they are virtually indistinguishable from the front. Clone, double, twin brother - remove the "Honor" sign under the screen, put the Home button there, and you will receive a subpoena from Tim Cook's team.
The differences are in the little things: there are already frames around the display, ribbed edges, a fingerprint scanner located too high on the back panel and a different design of the dual camera on the back side - for example, it does not protrude from the case. But overall, this is the most iPhone-like of all the most iPhone-like smartphones I've ever seen.
© Huawei press service
However, along with the design, Huawei apparently cut Apple 's approach to its production - outwardly, Honor 8 Pro is still good. 2.5-D glass creates the effect of a picture "floating" above the display, the front panel glistens like oiled, and reflects light beautifully. And the back, which, as in the case of the iPhone 7 Plus, is tactilely similar to "rubberized" metal, is pleasant to the touch and not particularly slippery. If you like the way the iPhone looks, then you will also love the 8 Pro. Here, even the metal tactilely resembles the one that Apple used in its phablet - also like rubberized. They didn't save on materials - so it's also the most beautiful iPhone-like smartphone of all its iPhone-like counterparts.
My main complaints about the Honor 8 were about screen quality. It was not bad, but strangely "green" and noticeably lost to the same P9, not to mention leaders like the iPhone 7 and Galaxy S7. In the 8 Pro, obviously, the display was installed completely different - and I have no complaints about it at all. First, it has grown - 5.7 inches versus 5.2 in the regular version. Secondly, the resolution has increased - Quad HD. The matrix is LTPS, and the black is so deep here that the dark wallpaper sometimes merges with the body. Colors are vibrant and rich and the display overall is even better than the P10. I only want to find fault with the viewing angles - the picture always remains visible, but noticeably loses in colors when the display is tilted. Forgivable.
© Huawei press service
I praised last year's Honor 8 for its optimization - it wasn't the most technically powerful, but it felt like the fastest Android smartphone on the other side of the Google Nexus. In the Pro version, fortunately, nothing has changed since then, and it behaves perfectly in everyday life, does not crash, does not freeze and does not slow down. Even pages in the browser - Android's Achilles heel - load smoothly, not jerkily. Huawei has done a good job of optimizing its Kirin 960 processor. And there is also six gigabytes of RAM at once, but, to be honest, I did not see any particular advantages from this. Unless you can brag to your friends. In games, the smartphone behaves well and practically does not heat up. The dual camera has already become for Huawei smartphonesthe standard - Honor 8 Pro is no exception. The principle of its operation is the same: one camera is "normal", the second is monochrome, receiving mainly information about the lighting. You press the shutter button, the smartphone takes two shots and then combines them. In theory, this should dramatically improve the contrast of the image. In practice - without any special miracles: P9 with this technology was inferior to the single-camera iPhone 7 and Galaxy S7.
Honor 8 Pro also loses, but only slightly. In the daytime, the pictures are almost identical to what the iPhone 7 Plus can do, at night the situation is still worse, but the result is still decent. The 8 Pro has not received the Leica branding, and therefore the portrait mode, which debuted in the P10, is not here. But the blur effect can be achieved using the wide aperture mode. You take a picture and then use your finger to indicate the area that you want to be in focus. The smartphone recognizes the subject and programmatically blurs the background behind. It works through time, but playing with this mode is quite fun.
Honor 8 Pro runs on Android 7.0 Nougat and traditionally for Huawei smartphones from the Google operating system there are only horns and legs. The EMUI shell is not for everyone, and I am not one of them: it has its own face, but traces of the former desire to copy iOS are still visible. This time, the new version of EMUI can learn: remember which applications and at what time you use, and at the right hour load them into the phone memory in advance, making the launch almost instantaneous. The idea is good, but whether it works or not, I could not understand: the smartphone launches all programs so quickly, even if it is something like Uber, which you use quite spontaneously.
In general, you can live with EMUI, but at the first opportunity I still brought its appearance as close as possible to the standard Android look. That's better.
Battery life is one of the 8 Pro's strong points. The smartphone is surprisingly "tenacious", and never "died" until late at night. There was enough time for a full day of messages and social media, YouTube on the subway and one 40-minute episode of the series before bed. Very good results. The same can be said about the smartphone as a whole: Honor 8 Pro turned out to be so successful that Huawei can fire someone for it - after all, the success of this model will certainly affect the popularity of the company's main flagship, the P10 (especially since they cost the same - 35 thousand rubles). But if I were the heads of the company, I would give everyone who worked on the phablet a prize: if they used to play the role of second violin, now they actually run the entire orchestra.>