Honor 8X: An Affordable 6.5-inch Premium Android Phone

The Honor 8X is an affordable phone with a 6.5-inch full-screen design that looks like a high-end smartphone. When you hold it in, the phone doesn’t feel cheap, and many people would be surprised to learn how much it actually costs.

But that’s hardly new for Honor. Not so long ago, we reviewed the Honor Play, a gaming-centric handset that is priced slightly above the Honor 8X’s ~$330 estimated value. The brand has always been about “quality for the price,” and so far, our smartphone data shows it distinctly review after review, whether it is for battery capacity, performance or here: display quality, Honor phones often have a value-oriented twist.

The industrial design looks and feels great and can rival competitors that cost $100 more. The phone is made with a classic dual-glass sandwich with an aluminum frame. It’s a proven design that is exceptionally rigid, and Honor has cleverly tuned it to reduce the parts and assembly costs.

The huge 6.5” IPS LCD display has a 2340×1080 resolution for a pixel density or sharpness of 396 PPI and can reproduce 16M colors and is relatively bright for a comfortable-enough usage in sunlight. The display has been carefully selected to offer a high price/quality ratio, and we computed its screen to body ratio at 84.4%, which is excellent.

The Sim Tray and micro-SDXC port are on the left side, and the bottom has the 3.5 mm audio port and oddly-enough a micro-USB connector for data and charging. This is another cost-reducing technique that would betray the otherwise high-end “feel” of this handset.

In the rear, there’s a 20 Megapixel camera with a respectable f/1.8 aperture and a 2 Megapixel camera that serves as Bokeh depth sensor for portrait photography. The front camera is a 16 Megapixel selfie cam with an aperture of f/2.0.

If you could crack it open (don’t do it), you would see a Kirin 770 processor from HiSilicon (a Huawei subsidiary, just like Honor). It’s a mid-range processor that offers good performance but can’t remotely approach what top tiers smartphones have today. In fact, the Honor Play would be the go-to phone for budget-conscious power users, the Honor 8X is for more casual users who enjoy social media and entertainment activities.

Yet, Honor 8X has GPU Turbo, a feature we discussed recently that might help boost the performance of specific games that are supported.

The 3750 mAh battery has excellent capacity and offers a high power density (capacity/size) which is superior to the iPhone XS Max for example. Not surprisingly, the amount of battery that you get for the price will easily leap high-end phones just as the chart below shows.

We’re looking forward to publishing a complete, in-depth review of the Honor 8X, just like we did for the Honor 7X last year.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, Editorspick, Honor, Honor 8X