Honor 8 review: Shining Knight
Shining Knight
The gallery
The Honor 8's gallery app offers a Timeline view, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. Alternatively, you can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums.
Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you some basic sharing options (including streaming it over DLNA).
The info icon up top gives some pretty detailed information about the image, including a histogram. Pulling down from anywhere on the screen lets you take a quick photo without leaving the gallery. The image comes out in a square 1:1 ratio at 2,976 x 2,976.
Album view • chronological view • viewing an image • detailed info • camera quick access
You can also go into a more capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), filters and beauty enhancements. You can adjust levels and add individual watermarks for time, location, weather, food and mood.
The image editor is quite capable
Video player
When it comes to playing videos, the Honor 8 default player is pretty basic. Its sole option is playback speed.
Simplistic video player with few options
Music player
The Honor 8 comes with Huawei's custom music player app. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your playlists, too. The background of the app changes dynamically to match the album art, which is a nice little touch.
The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. There are no equalizers to speak off, but the app does have a few extra features. It would try to pull album art, song info and lyrics automatically for you.
The music player
The Honor 8 lacks FM radio.
Audio clarity is perfectly clear, nicely loud
When used with an active external amplifier the Honor 8 delivered perfectly clean output. The volume levels are higher than average too (and better than what the P9 offers), so it's a great showing overall.
Stereo crosstalk worsens by a tiny amount when you hook a pair of headphones, but it's the only affected reading. Loudness remains good, if not great, so it's really an impressive result by the Honor flagship.
And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| +0.09, -0.04 | -98.3 | 98.5 | 0.0050 | 0.010 | -97.3 | |
| +0.07, -0.04 | -98.0 | 98.9 | 0.0052 | 0.025 | -75.5 | |
| +0.01, -0.04 | -97.3 | 98.5 | 0.0053 | 0.0090 | -96.2 | |
| +0.32, -0.02 | -93.0 | 97.9 | 0.0066 | 0.167 | -65.5 | |
| LG G5 | +0.01, -0.04 | -92.6 | 92.6 | 0.0051 | 0.0096 | -93.3 |
| LG G5 (headphones) | +0.05, -0.01 | -92.2 | 92.3 | 0.0029 | 0.037 | -50.7 |
| Xiaomi Mi 5 | +0.01, -0.03 | -95.3 | 95.1 | 0.0034 | 0.0065 | -95.1 |
| Xiaomi Mi 5 (headphones) | +0.01, -0.03 | -95.2 | 95.1 | 0.0027 | 0.013 | -71.5 |
| Samsung Galaxy S7 | +0.01, -0.04 | -92.5 | 92.6 | 0.0027 | 0.0078 | -92.7 |
| Samsung Galaxy S7 (headphones) | +0.05, -0.05 | -91.9 | 92.1 | 0.0044 | 0.063 | -73.4 |
| +0.01, -0.04 | -95.5 | 89.5 | 0.0033 | 0.012 | -94.8 | |
| +0.22, -0.24 | -95.1 | 89.5 | 0.0057 | 0.212 | -59.8 | |
| +0.03, -0.04 | -93.5 | 93.5 | 0.0016 | 0.0075 | -73.2 | |
| +0.10, -0.06 | -93.8 | 93.9 | 0.0030 | 0.101 | -68.2 |
Honor 8 frequency response
You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.
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.