Gadgetory

Huawei adds another mid-range offering to its North American lineup and it's definitely a looker but before we can put this golden beauty through its paces we have to get it out of the box I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's our first impressions on the Huawei gx8 really interesting packaging folks the phone is cradled sideways in the Box flanked by the papers we never read in a pack containing the AC adapter micro USB cable and a pair of really cheap earbuds no seriously these just kind of feel like a waste Apple earpods style buds which do a terrible job of blocking out surrounding noise in your environment if you want to listen to music on your phone for the sake of your hearing health I'd highly recommend picking up a cheap pair of buds or cans which can do a better job of sealing up your ear canal back to the phone though Huawei again impresses with a wonderful build quality that could easily pass for a flagship phone the GX 8 is almost identical to the International version called the g8 for some reason we Americans get a super edgy X in the name but it doesn't signify any significant difference which we could uncover the specs are pretty common territory in this price range our review unit came packin ache welcome 6-1-6 chipset with two gigabytes of RAM 16 gigabytes of storage and a 3000 milliamp hour battery at the unlocked price of 299 dollars this is $100 more than its little brother the honor 5x which we recently reviewed for that extra cash we get a nicer aluminium shell softer corners and edges a graceful taper to the rear casing and the seams are terrifically finished in a way we didn't see on the honor 5x it's less boxy and fits in the hand a little easier considering both phones have the same 5.5 inch sized screen we also see improvements to the camera adding Hardware optical image stabilization to the 13 megapixel sensor we can see this results in a larger module but it doesn't push the camera lens cover out with too awkward of a bulge the top of the phone has the headphone jack and secondary microphone and Huawei loves drilling holes into the bottoms of these phones though we only get one speaker on the right-hand side of the device unlike the honor 5x there's only a single pin tool tray for SIM cards in the memory card slot you can use this tray for either 2 Sims or to have a sim in a microSD card but you can't have all three at the same time and of course the fantastic fingerprint sensor returns just setting it up now in training a couple fingers Huawei still has one of the fastest and most accurate solutions for biometric unlocking found on any phone let alone on a mid-range er the initial first boot did take a bit longer than expected but thankfully we have a minimum of setup software to troll through while logging into our accounts but then we get into the software huawei's emui skin is one of my least favorite ways to use an Android device this iPhone inspired organizational style a phone without an app drawer just feels cluttered mixing app shortcuts and widgets and we have an iOS layout for the notification shade and the quick access menu from the lockscreen all of this is running on top of android 5.1 so thankfully you can install a different launcher but a new ish phone in this day and age we'd certainly have appreciated a marshmallow update Huawei's theme does match the phone hardware really well though golden icons for pre-installed apps is a sharp look when viewed opposite the golden phone body the skin two icons look classy but it does kind of fall apart once you start installing more apps happily it's another mid-range ER which doesn't hit you too hard with pre-installed value-added software COFF COFF bloatware COFF COFF facebook twitter Emmas on music Kindle and the up health tracker are the only apps outside of Huawei and Google services you might need to ignore or uninstall but now begins the testing period as we put this phone through its paces there's a lot we can predict with this hardware things like gaming prowess but will we see much lifestyle functional difference over other less expensive phones and how might this beauty compete against more expensive fashionable mid-range errs like the HTC One a9 which sells for $200 more stay tuned folks our full review of the huawei GX 8 will be on the way soon as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews and editorials and hit that thumbs up button to help us out with a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Kwon Carlos back now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review