Huawei G8 review: Elegantly relegated

Orderly image gallery

Despite the continuous stream of Android updates (now up to 5.1.1 in the Huawei G8 and Mate S), EMUI 3.1 has retained and borrowed most of its styling and features from its predecessor. The image gallery is a prime example. It still offers a Timeline view, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. It defaults to the Timeline view, but 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 Gallery app • Viewing an image

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 (which detects faces automatically).

It is very intuitive and packed with options, including things like filters, effects, levels and even special watermarks for time, location, weather, food and mood.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

When it came to playing videos, the Huawei G8 default player does a good job supporting every common video codec, but unfortunately it lacks support for AC3 audio. The codec does require a license and this is usually the case with most Android phones anyway.

We couldn't find a way to load subtitles, but Dolby Mobile enhancement is supported. Interestingly enough, the video player on the G8 does support window playback mode, which is missing from the Mate S. That's yet another example of the inconsistent software features across the lineup.

Straightforward video player

Music player

The Huawei G8 comes with Huawei's custom music player app. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your own 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.

Another nice addition is the ability to filter the songs by length, so no pesky ringtones show up in your library.

The Music player

FM radio

The Huawei G8 has a built-in FM receiver. It can play through the headset or the loudspeaker, but you'll need to have the headset plugged in as it serves as an antenna.

We were disappointed not to find RDS support (Huawei is a frequent offender in this area) - you'll have to name your radio stations by hand.

The FM Radio also has a notification area shortcut

Audio output may not be the loudest, but its clarity impresses

The Huawei G8 showed perfect clarity in the first part of our audio quality test. When attached to an active external amplifier, the smartphone produced great scores top to bottom with no weak points to its performance. Things weren’t as great in terms of loudness, with the G8 reaching only an average rating.

Impressively enough, plugging in our standard headphones didn't cause much damage. A tiny hike in stereo crosstalk is all we got and we still ended with some great scores. Volume remained average though, so we'd advise against going for particularly high-impedance headsets (our standard set is rated 32 Ohm). A very solid showing by the G8 here, overall.

Here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Huawei G8 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.