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Update: HONOR 8 Pro to launch on July 6 in India as an Amazon exclusive
Amazon has set up a dedicated page on its website for the HONOR 8 Pro, where you can sign up to get notified as soon as the device is released. If you're interested, visit the retailer's website via the button below.
Original story: The HONOR 8 Pro was launched in Europe earlier this year, and the company’s flagship smartphone is coming soon to India. The HONOR 8 Pro packs top-of-the-line specifications and looks every bit as brilliant as phones that cost a couple of hundred dollars more.
I got my hands on the HONOR 8 Pro earlier today – a day after the OnePlus 5 launch in India – and since the former will be launched soon (as early as first week of July), it’s hard to not compare the two. The OnePlus 5 is a terrific smartphone, and the company has got a lot of fans and hype going for it. But can HONOR 8 Pro spoil the party?
The HONOR 8 Pro is encased in a glass and metal chassis, and while there are Midnight Black and Platinum Gold color variants, I can’t get over the gorgeous Navy Blue one. For a smartphone that packs in a 4000mAh battery, it’s remarkable that the device is less than 7mm thick.
The HONOR 8 Pro sports a 5.7-inch Quad HD 2K display, picking up an edge over the OnePlus 5. A lot of people think that QHD displays are an overkill on smartphones and affect the battery life, and they’re not wrong. But one look at this display, and it’s hard to not appreciate the beauty of it.
Both phones run their own flavor of Android Nougat – the HONOR 8 Pro running the latest version of the company’s proprietary software, EMUI 5.1. It’s clean and fluid, and some of the customizations and nifty utilities that it offers help make the user experience better. HONOR claims that after 500 days of usage, the smartphone will be 80% as fast as it was fresh out of the box, asserting that other Android smartphones manage only 50% efficiency.
Of course, this smooth software experience is powered by Kirin 960 – HUAWEI’s top-tier chipset – and backed by 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. That’s not very different from OnePlus 5, which packs in Qualcomm’s top processor, the Snapdragon 835, and has two memory variants with 6 GB and 8 GB of RAM. For multimedia content hoarders, the lack of microSD expansion on the OnePlus 5 might be a tad disappointing but HONOR 8 Pro doesn’t make that omission.
The highlight of the OnePlus 5 is its maiden dual camera setup and it does a great job with it. HONOR on the other hand has been in that game since a while, and the HONOR 8 Pro boasts of fourth generation of the dual cameras with twin 12 MP cameras – an RGB sensor for color and a monochrome sensor for details.
A glance at specifications sheet makes it clear that it is a tough choice between the two mid-range flagships where the sum of parts is greater than the whole.
The OnePlus 5 took a big leap to the north side of ₹30,000 ($465), which is a pretty sweet spot for mid-rangers and where the OnePlus 3 and 3T reveled in. And in the end, it might boil down to price where HONOR could surprise many. They’d really want to, since they’ve got a great device on the table and would want to make a mark in this market where they’ve been consistently growing yet without a marquee ‘honor’.