Honor 8 Pro review: Screentrooper

Telephony

The EMUI dialer shares a common interface with the contacts app. There are no groundbreaking features here, and nothing missing.

Smart dialing • Contacts

The dual-SIM settings menu lets you rename cards, disable them from software, and select which one does calls or data by default. The interface leads us to believe that while 4G may be limited to just one card, both get 3G connectivity in addition to 2G, which the specs don't indicate.

The interface is not ideal in that dual SIM settings are in one menu, while the mobile networks are in a different one. You may need to do a little bit of back-and-forth to set things up precisely to your liking - say, to limit the primary card to 3G. 'Primary' as in the default card that gets 4G connectivity - you choose that in dual SIM settings. Then in the mobile networks section you get to pick the preferred network type, but only for this primary card - the other one makes do with the rest of the available radios.

Loudspeaker

Just like the P10, P9, and Honor 8, the Honor 8 Pro has a pretty powerful speaker at its disposal. After hearing the stereo speakers on the P9 Plus and the P10 Plus, we just couldn't shake the feeling that having a single speaker on the Honor 8 Pro was kind of a cheat.

Still, as expected, the dedicated bottom-mounted speaker turned out to be the quite powerful and produced a Very Good score in our loudspeaker test. It has a clean and rich sound output, and we give Huawei credit where it's due.

Pre-installed apps

Huawei offers a pretty rich default app package. The Health app is pretty great. It tracks steps and calculates calories burnt, but can also supposedly count the number of floors you've climbed.

Health

Smart Remote and Compass are another pair of generic, yet hardware-specific apps. It's a good thing Huawei was nice enough to throw in its own IR controller app, since otherwise, you would be left searching for a third-party solution that knows how to communicate with the Huawei IR API. The application itself also looks good and offers a surprisingly rich database of device remote control codes.

Smart Remote • Adding appliances • Compass

You also have a ton of basic tools preloaded, including a proper file manager, calendar app, notes, weather, sound recorder, and flashlight.

File manager • Clock • Calculator • Recorder • Flashlight