Honor 8 review: Shining Knight
Shining Knight
Telephony
The Honor 8 handles voice calls with ease and sound quality doesn't disappoint. The phone offers powerful dual-SIM manager in case you opt for the dual-SIM flavor, too.
Smart dialing • recent calls • call log
The stock dialer app is a trinity of tabs bundled together - these include the Dialer, Contacts, and Favorites. The phonebook offers all the usual sorting and display options, it supports multiple accounts, and there are lots of fields available for each contact.
The Honor 8 scored a Good mark in our standardized loudspeaker test. Our impressions from the speaker's sound quality are mostly positive - it produces deep and rich sound, but the default ringtones are rather quiet and you may miss some calls. Perhaps you can load a ringtone of your choosing.
| Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Ringing | Overall score | |
| 61.3 | 61.1 | 65.7 | Below Average | |
| 65.8 | 66.0 | 66.5 | Below Average | |
| 62.4 | 71.0 | 77.8 | Good | |
| 66.5 | 71.1 | 74.4 | Good | |
| 72.1 | 66.6 | 75.6 | Good | |
| 67.1 | 66.2 | 82.6 | Good | |
| 72.0 | 66.6 | 77.5 | Good | |
| 66.0 | 71.5 | 83.2 | Very Good | |
| 71.7 | 73.7 | 81.3 | Very Good | |
| 75.7 | 73.5 | 79.5 | Excellent |
App package
The Honor 8 ships with WPS office, which can be used for some basic document editing on the go. It can handle text documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as PDF files. It can also export to PDF.
WPS office
Phone Manager is Huawei's do-it-all app for keeping control over your phone. It lets you control all sorts of features from call/message privacy and Do Not Disturb settings to phone optimization and app permissions, to network and battery usage.
The app features a one-touch optimization feature that frees up memory space and gives you settings recommendations for maximum battery performance. It's a hell of a slick feature that few manufacturers offer.
Phone manager
Battery Manager is part of Phone Manager and includes a selection of three power plans with varying degrees of feature limitations. From here you can also control which apps can remain active after you send the phone to sleep.
Battery manager
Huawei has bundled the Honor 8 with its Health app, which tracks steps and calculates calories burnt, but can also supposedly count the number of floors you've climbed. A file manager is also present, and it supports batch actions.
Health app homescreen • week view • file manager • file manager • more tools
Reader comments
- Anonymous
- 16 Aug 2023
- 39y
Never had this problem with any other phone. My Honot 8 phone has so far twice dialed the emergency services by itself and it is really embarrassing and stressful when that happens,..
- Anonymous
- 03 Jun 2021
- pwa
I'm writing this on the Honor 8, it's an Awesome phone, but in 2021, the design looks like an iPhone with a navigation bar
- Bouvanni
- 06 May 2021
- nUL
Totally, if you get it at a decent price. My favorite features are the IR sensor, fingerprint button and knock detection.