Smartphones brand Honor, owned by Huawei, quickly became popular in Ukraine. They have an excellent combination of low price, high quality, rich functionality, and a new name, more harmonious for our ears, apparently, also played a role. The company has officially presented the novelty – Honor 8A, and it’s time to take a closer look at it.
Appearance, design, equipment
Externally, the Honor 8A (more formally the model is called JAT-LX1) is similar to most modern smartphones – a black plastic case with rounded corners and edges, a FullView display with a cutout for the camera, the standard location of connectors and buttons. Distinctive features – the Honor logo on the front panel and non-standard design of the rear wall of the case, one part of which is matte, and the other – lacquered. The horizontal layout, resembling a camera, hints that the camera has been given special attention (looking ahead, I will say that it is the way it is).
Unfortunately, the phone uses a micro USB port, which, after using Type-C, no longer wants to be seen in any devices. Two microphones on the lower and upper edges allow you to record video with stereo sound. The audio jack, fortunately, did not fall prey to fashion or economy.
The protective glass is already glued to the display, unfortunately, without an oleophobic coating. The cutout at the top of the glass leaves the camera and the light and proximity sensors open.
Equipment
The Honor 8A serves as a “motor” for the Mediatek Helio P35 – a fairly powerful system-on-chip, made using a 12-nanometer process technology, with eight fast cores (4 x 2.3 GHz and 4 x 1.8 GHz) and a PowerVR Rogue GE8320 video core operating at up to 680 MHz. RAM – the minimum required (2 GB), the internal drive provides the user with about 24 of 32 GB of flash memory. Despite the support for Wi-Fi standard ac stated in the chipset’s specifications, the smartphone only works on b / g / n networks and does not see access points with a frequency of 5 GHz.
The display of the smartphone is very good. The color gamut is close to the reference, the color temperature is too high, but the deviations from the norm are not critical. The fairly high maximum brightness (469 cd / m2) provides good readability in all conditions. The brightness of black (0.594 cd / m2) is tall, visually it looks like dark gray, which results in a not very high, but quite sufficient picture contrast (789: 1). Here are the measurement results at the default settings.
Purely subjective claims to the image is not, to the coldish shade of the displays we have become accustomed to. But if you have the time and desire, you can adjust the screen better. To do this, the settings have three presets – by default, warm and cold, as well as a more subtle manual setting. In the “Heat” mode, we already have a smaller variation in color components, and the maximum brightness and contrast values are a couple percent lower.
There is also a separate eye protection function that filters out blue color and makes the image warmer.
The image remains readable from any angle, with an increase in the angle of the color is not distorted, only the contrast decreases.
Remember, I said that the design of the back of the phone “under the camera” – this is no accident? So, the main camera of the Honor 8A is clearly from a higher price category. She is only one, but what a!
F1.8 aperture, fast and accurate phase autofocus and rich functionality of the camera application will not leave indifferent the amateur mobile photo and video. As a flash (and flashlight) uses one powerful LED. With a sufficiently bright light, the camera is pleased with the detail and clarity of pictures, while lighting is weaker, of course, noise appears, but, unlike most telephone cameras, noise reduction works delicately, carefully processing the border of contrasting transitions and not smoothing small details. Even at dusk or in low artificial light, good shots are obtained (see the test gallery below).
The HDR function draws up the details in the shadows and eliminates overexposure. Although the camera asks to fix the smartphone while taking pictures, it is unlikely that the camera takes several pictures with different exposures, but rather it’s just software processing of the image (this is supported by fast shooting and the lack of splitting in HDR images).
Professional mode pleased with the ability to manually set the shutter speed from 1/4000 s to as much as 8 seconds, which allows you to take photos without strong noise in low light (of course, this is suitable only for stationary objects and provided the phone is fixed on any tripod). The RAW (DNG) format, of course, is not supported — that would be too good.
The video is filmed in only two possible resolutions – 1080p and 720p (the default is set to lower) with stereo sound. I will not give examples here, because the test pre-sales sample for some reason shot a video with a very low bitrate and corresponding quality, but the company assured me that this is all right with the final version of the smartphone.
Phone functions are standard, there are no special features. The dialer contains Cyrillic to quickly find contacts. Call recording is not provided.
The sound quality is excellent, the loud speaker volume is more than enough, the ringtones also sound loud and clear.
Honor 8A does not possess any special musical superhuman abilities, but it reproduces music quite qualitatively. The sound is smooth, neutral, without obvious failures and rises of any parts of the range. With Bluetooth headphones, the phone works without problems.
Honor 8A is one of the most affordable smartphones with NFC support. Finally, this technology is becoming mass, I think, it will soon be in every smartphone, like Bluetooth and a fingerprint sensor. By the way, the fingerprint sensor on the rear panel, in addition to identification, can work out gestures (for this, you do not need to register a fingerprint). Fingerprint recognition is fast and clear, gestures work correctly, but because of the small area of the sensor and its recessed into the body, they are not very convenient. There are several additional ways to control – a screenshot by holding the screen with three fingers, unlocking the screen when the phone is lifted from the table (it works with a rather sudden movement and with a noticeable delay) and the ringing tone and the alarm are turned off. When the phone is in your pocket or bag and the sensors at the top of the screen are closed, the screen is blocked from being accidentally pressed.
System and applications
The smartphone runs on Android 9 with a proprietary shell EMUI (also the ninth version). For applications, there is a separate searchable menu; the most popular actions for applications can be launched with a touch and hold. Some heaped animated widgets are not here, just a few different effects when flipping through the pages of the desktop. After setting up, the desktop can be locked so as not to move icons and widgets when you accidentally touch
To the great joy of reviewers, there is an opportunity to make long screenshots with automatic scrolling and even record screencasts.
Of the additional features, I would like to mention the “Digital Balance” settings section – there you can view statistics on the use of the phone, screen time, which applications were launched. You can limit (both for yourself and for the child, with PIN-code protection) the total time of working with the phone, the time of using individual applications, or block any of them altogether.
Performance and autonomy
The smartphone, despite the small amount of memory by today’s standards, works very briskly and stably, no problems were noticed during the testing.
Pretty good for its price, with most games and applications will not be problems. In addition to the mandatory API OpenGL ES 3.0, an alternative API Vulkan is supported.
The battery charge with a capacity of just over three ampere hours was enough for one and a half days without restrictions, and the ultra-energy-saving mode helped me to reach the outlet at the end of the second day.
The bottom line
The company is positioning the model 8A as the first smartphone for the student. Yes, this is a good option with a more than justified price, and the “Digital Balance” function would be most welcome in this case, but many parents would prefer to buy a child “for slaughter” something else cheaper, up to 3000 UAH, so that it was not so sorry when the child breaks it, drown or lose it. Honor 8A, as it seems to me, would rather fit into the role of an upgrade after such an extra-budget model. It seems that it will also be a good choice for an adult who has many different expenses (family, children, car, hobby) and an expensive phone does not fit into an overstrained family budget. This buyer is not interested in top-notch, but simply sufficient performance and functionality, without overpayment for unclaimed benefits. But the presence of NFC at a price of $ 150 may well be a decisive factor when choosing, because wireless payments using the phone is convenient.
3 reasons to buy Honor 8A:
- you need a smartphone for a schoolboy with enough speed for most games;
- you want to limit the use of the phone by a child;
- you need an inexpensive NFC smartphone for contactless payments;
- You need a camera that can shoot in low light.
1 reason not to buy Honor 8A:
- small icons in the notification bar will be inconvenient for people with poor eyesight.