Gadgetory

all right I want to keep this conversation loose it's been 48 hours ish since we got the honor eight from the launch event up in San Francisco there's just nothing quite like doing a midnight unboxing video from your hotel room and I'm still sick as a dog I picked up something funky coming back from that event it's all up in my nose right now but I heart transitioned over the honor eight turning it into my daily driver so we could chew through a review as quickly and efficiently as possible just a little inside baseball right quick we get asked a lot in the comments and our videos on pocketnow.com on social media what's your favorite phone or what's your daily driver and legitimately I have to answer whatever phone I'm reviewing is my daily driver our entire editorial schedule just got kind of a little interrupted once we got our hands on the note seven when I flew out to New York to meet up with hi mate of Nevada rod to cover Samsung's newest phablet I was in the middle of reviewing the xperia x performance and the axon 7 now the plan was to give hime a the axon 7 I would finish up the X performance and then we can move on with our lives and start prepping for Aoife that plan got all wibbly-wobbly twisty twisty but we promise you the axon 7 is getting wrapped up we will have a review of that phone out shortly but until all of that get sorted out I'm switching over to the on rate and I'm pretty excited about it most of us in North America probably know the honor brand by phones like the honor 5x released earlier this year this $200 phone received critical acclaim for being such an amazing budget-busting device now while we appreciated what honor brought to the table if I'm being honest with you folks I actually liked the Huawei branded phones better not really comparing oranges to oranges here but stepping up to phones like the Huawei gx8 yes it's a more expensive device but every little attention to detail piece of this phone I liked better than its honor counterpart have you been following the reviews on this channel especially the real camera reviews you would know that I personally felt in love with the Huawei p9 released earlier this year of course notable for these dual camera sensors on the back of the phone in this big lekha badge here by the flash it was this phone that helped me score a victory against Adam Lane and his Lumia 1020 in our pocket now fireworks challenge so I'm flying up to San Francisco I've seen the Flyers for the honor event it's two circle next to each other looks like an 8 or an infinity sign or something like that I'm thinking maybe what we'll get is some sort of mid ranger option something that bridges the gap between the 5x and maybe phones like the GX 8 but they're gonna throw that dual camera system on it it could be really compelling it could be a fun solution and then they show off the otter 8 and it looks very much like the p9 it looks so much like the p9 because it's almost exactly like the p9 so I'll get the nitpicks out of the way first here we've got emui on tap I am NOT a fan of emui turns your entire Android experience into something more resembling iOS if I wanted iOS I would buy an iPhone so of course the first thing I did was I threw nova launcher on there just so I could get back to my app drawer and that layout of course we do have that issue with the split notification shade you know you just kind of have to live with that unless someone has a good option for replacing the notification shade drop me a comment below this video now the look at this phone is really cool during the honor announcement for this device they detail that there are 15 layers of glass there are different diffracting elements to help you carve up light and reflection in really interesting ways you always have these sort of they look like spotlight sore spot lamps that are sort of streaking through the back panel of your phone for example I think the idol 4s is a very attractive phone but there's a subtle difference between the way these two glass back devices are playing with reflections and I think the honor eight has a slightly nicer look to it in fact the only device that I might compare this to would be some of the newer glass back effects that we see on phones like the note 7 but if you've been following my videos you guys know i'm actually not the biggest fan of glass on the back of phone I think it looks really cool like I want to set it up on a museum stand under museum lighting just because I think it's such a great design piece but I don't know that it's the most practical material to make the back of a phone out of first of all if you saw the the first impressions video in the launch video it's just a crazy fingerprint magnet wiping this phone off on my shirt in between every single shot and I still couldn't keep it from just magnetically attracting smudges from all around its environment so the honor folks supplied us with these plastic clear clip-on back plates and that's what my honor eights gonna live in but we've also gotten a number of Commons from people saying that they think the p9 is the more attractive device there's something to be said for the glass cutout window that white accent the metal phone body I can totally understand why people would be of differing opinions as to which device they think is more attractive but I do have to commend honor for making this back glass piece just so simple it's so clean you've got this one little break for the fingerprint sensor and then everything else is completely flush totally smooth there's no other break or seam or gap and that is actually pretty impressive I mean it's just blue does it getting out of the setup process this thing performs a lot like how we found the p9 performed that's a very good thing I don't have a lot of experience with high silicon cure in processors this uses the cure in 950 which as far as I can tell is just an underclock version of the cure in 955 found in the p9 but from all of the numbers that we've been able to generate from the tests that we've been able to do have played a couple games on it I can't find a significant real-world difference we're talking maybe a five percent difference in benchmarking and then in real-world application this is one of the few phones that I've done that automatic setup process where it just dumps all of your apps from another device after you kind of like make out with the back of another phone and it's one of the few that hasn't completely locked up while it's been downloading that huge deluge of app updates all phones are going to slow down when you're hitting both data and you're sort of saving information and hitting that CPU to install those new programs but this phone handled it better than most when doing that initial setup and this phone post some of the best multi-core benchmarking numbers I've ever seen it does lose single core benchmarks against phones powered by a Qualcomm 820 but any app that's taking advantage of that big little octa-core environment that the kuren provides you're going to see wonderful performance out of this device and a quick note about the cameras again very exciting to see that this is nearly identical performance to what we found on the façade Pinay the p9 became something of a backup phone for me while I was out reviewing other devices it joins a list of phones like the Lumia 1020 in the LG v10 if I knew I was going to be out shooting photos this was a phone I wanted to have with me and now the honoree joins it for the most part nearly identical but we do see some differences in the camera app slightly different layout most of those modes are still intact we saw have a full manual control mode which is phenomenal unfortunately the honor 8 does not have native raw capture built directly into the supplied camera app now unlike some other manufacturers who shall remain nameless you can shoot RAW photos you just have to download a third-party app if you're in a situation where you feel you really want to get that raw image captured and all of the electronic shenanigans that have to be employed to communicate with these two image sensors are handled at a hardware level so you don't have to worry about using a third-party camera app all of that information is still going to be transferred and raw photos from open camera look nearly identical to raw photos from the p9 and the Huawei camera folks I gotta say this is a really happy surprise for me not only seeing what honor was able to do in pulling the p9 hardware over to their youth brand the honor for the brave brand but also knowing that this is coming out at a three hundred and ninety nine dollar price point I'm gonna spend a couple more days playing with it I'm gonna try and knock out a review over the weekend but even from the second and third day impressions I can already tell you this is more than capable hardware at a great price point which totally deserves to stand opposite phones like the one plus three for the axon seven that's really exciting territory for a manufacturer to be playing in right now it's probably the most competitive price point on the market today and if you can give me something cool to play with in this tier something unique well that just makes my job a lot easier so folks be on the lookout for our full review of the honor eight I am going to be doing a few more camera tests just to make sure that all of our results are in line with what we found on the p9 if there are any significant differences then I'll try and do a separate camera review video but we might end up just linking back to the p9 camera view if our results are consistently similar with that other phone as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more fun rambling video vlog e discussions on gadgets that are fun to play with and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video