Honor 8A Review: The First Smartphone for Your Child

Smartphones from the Honor brand, owned by Huawei, quickly became popular in Ukraine. They have a great combination

low price, high quality, richfunctionality, and the new name, more euphonious to our ears, apparently also played a role. The company has already officially presented a new product – Honor 8A, and it’s time to take a closer look at it.

Appearance, design, equipment

Externally, the Honor 8A (more formal modelreferred to as JAT-LX1) is similar to most modern smartphones - a black plastic case with rounded corners and edges, a FullView display with a cut-out for the camera, the standard arrangement of connectors and buttons. Distinctive features - the Honor logo on the front panel and non-standard design of the rear wall of the case, one part of which is matte, and the other - lacquered. The horizontal layout, which resembles a camera, hints that the camera has been given special attention (looking ahead, I will say that this is the way it is).


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Unfortunately, the phone has a USB connector.micro format, which after using Type-C no longer wants to see in any devices. Two microphones on the lower and upper edges allow you to record video with stereo sound. The audio jack, fortunately, did not fall prey to fashion or economy.


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The protective glass is already glued to the display, unfortunately, without an oleophobic coating. The cutout at the top of the glass leaves the camera and the light and proximity sensors open.


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Under the grill of the earpiece, the multicolor charging and notification LED indicator hides:


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There was no wired headset in our test kit, only a charger with an output current of 1 A and a cable.


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Equipment

&#8220;Motor&#8221; for Honor 8A servesMediatek Helio P35 is a fairly powerful system-on-chip, made using a 12-nanometer process technology, with eight fast cores (4 x 2.3 GHz and 4 x 1.8 GHz) and a PowerVR Rogue GE8320 video core operating at up to 680 MHz . RAM is the required minimum (2 GB), the internal storage provides the user with about 24 of the 32 GB of flash memory. Despite the support for Wi-Fi ac standard stated in the chipset's characteristics, the smartphone only works in b/g/n networks and does not see access points with a frequency of 5 GHz.

The smartphone display is very good.The color gamut is close to the reference, the color temperature is too high, but deviations from the norm are not critical. A fairly high maximum brightness (469 cd/m2) ensures good readability in any conditions. The brightness of black (0.594 cd/m2) is high, visually it looks like dark gray, which ultimately gives a not very high, but quite sufficient picture contrast (789:1). Here are the measurement results at default settings:


 

Purely subjectively there are no complaints about the image,We have already become accustomed to the coolish tint of the displays. But if you have time and desire, you can customize the screen better. To do this, there are three presets in the settings - default, warm and cold, as well as finer manual settings. In &#8220;Heat&#8221; mode we already have a smaller spread of color components, and the values ​​of maximum brightness and contrast are a couple of percent lower.


 

There is also a separate eye protection function that filters out blue color and makes the image warmer.


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The image remains readable from any angle, with an increase in the angle of the color is not distorted, only the contrast decreases.


 

Street, sunlight, the maximum brightness of the display. Quite comfortable:


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Remember I said that the back panel designphone &#8220;for camera&#8221; – is this for a reason? So, the main camera of the Honor 8A is clearly from a higher price category. She is only one, but what a one!


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F1 aperture.8, fast and accurate phase autofocus and rich functionality of the camera application will not leave indifferent the amateur mobile photo and video. As a flash (and flashlight) uses one powerful LED. With sufficiently bright light, the camera is pleased with the detail and clarity of the pictures, while lighting is weaker, of course, noise appears, but, unlike most telephone cameras, noise reduction works delicately, carefully processing the border of contrasting transitions and not smoothing small details. Even at dusk or in low artificial light, good shots are obtained (see the test gallery below).

The HDR function does a good job pulling out the details in the shadows andeliminates overexposure. Although the camera asks to fix the smartphone during the shooting, it is unlikely that the camera takes several pictures with different exposures, but rather it’s just software processing of the image (this is supported by fast shooting and the lack of splitting in HDR images).

Here are two pictures &#8211; normal and with HDR:


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Here are a couple more:


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Professional mode pleased with the opportunitymanually set the shutter speed from 1/4000 s to as much as 8 seconds, which allows you to take photos without strong noise in low light (of course, this is only suitable for stationary objects and provided the phone is fixed on any tripod). The RAW (DNG) format, of course, is not supported — that would be too good. Here are all the camera modes and settings:


 

 

I couldn’t resist and, as in digital camera tests,I took a series of pictures with different sensitivities from ISO100 to ISO3200 indoors, with diffused light from a window in cloudy weather. It is better to download them to your computer and watch them in 1:1 size, so they are posted in a separate gallery.

That's how Honor 8A takes a photo:

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gallery with full-size images

The video is shot in only two possibleresolutions - 1080p and 720p (the default is set to smaller) with stereo sound. I will not give examples here, because for some reason the test pre-delivery sample was shooting a video with a very low bitrate and corresponding quality, but the company assured me that everything is fine with the final version of the smartphone.

Phone functions are standard, there are no special features. The dialer contains Cyrillic to quickly search for contacts. Call recording is not provided.


 

The sound quality is excellent, the loud speaker volume is more than enough, ringtones also sound loud and clear.

Some special musical superpowersHonor 8A does not possess, but it reproduces music quite qualitatively. The sound is smooth, neutral, without obvious failures and rises of any parts of the range. With Bluetooth headphones, the phone works without problems.

Honor 8A - one of the most affordable smartphones withNFC support. Finally, this technology is becoming mass, I think, it will soon be in every smartphone, like Bluetooth and a fingerprint sensor. By the way, the fingerprint sensor on the back panel, in addition to identification, can work out gestures (for this, you do not need to register a print). Fingerprint recognition is fast and clear, gestures work correctly, but because of the small area of ​​the sensor and its recessed into the body, they are not very convenient. There are several additional ways to control - taking a screenshot by holding three fingers across the screen, unlocking the screen when the phone is lifted from the table (it works with a rather sharp movement and with a noticeable delay) and turns off the call signal and the alarm and turns the phone over. When the phone is in your pocket or bag and the sensors at the top of the screen are closed, the screen is blocked from being accidentally pressed.


 

 

System and applications

The smartphone runs Android 9 withproprietary EMUI shell (also the ninth version). There is a separate menu for applications with the ability to search, the most popular actions for applications can be launched using a touch and hold. There are no fancy animated widgets here, just a few different effects when turning pages on the desktop. Once configured, the desktop can be locked to prevent icons and widgets from moving due to accidental touches.


 

To the great joy of reviewers, there is an opportunity to make long screenshots with automatic scrolling and even record screencasts. Here is an example of such a screenshot:


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The screencast recording button is available in the radio button panel:


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Among the additional functions I would like to mentionsettings section &#8220;Digital balance&#8221; &#8211; There you can view statistics on phone usage, screen time, which applications were launched. You can limit (both for yourself and for your child, with PIN code protection) the total time you work with the phone, the time you use individual applications, or even block any of them.


 

 

Performance and autonomy

Smartphone, despite the current smallto the standards, the memory size is very fast and stable; no problems were noticed during testing. Here are the results of the synthetic tests 3D Mark, PC Mark, Geekbench and AnTuTu:


 

Pretty good for its price, with most games and applications will not be problems. In addition to the mandatory API OpenGL ES 3.0, an alternative API Vulkan is supported.

The battery charge with a capacity of just over three ampere hours was enough for one and a half days without restrictions, and the ultra-energy-saving mode helped me to reach the outlet at the end of the second day.


 

 

In the dry residue

The company positions the 8A model as the firstsmartphone for a schoolchild. Yes, this is a good option with a more than justified price, and the &#8220;Digital Balance&#8221; will come in handy in this case, but many parents will prefer to buy their child &#8220;for slaughter&#8221; something even cheaper, up to 3000 UAH, so that you won’t feel so sorry when a child breaks it, drowns it or loses it. Honor 8A, it seems to me, is more suitable as an upgrade after such an ultra-budget model. I think it would also be a good choice for an adult who has many different expenses (family, children, car, hobbies) and an expensive phone does not fit into an overextended family budget. Such a buyer is not at all interested in top-end, but simply in sufficient performance and functionality, without overpaying for unclaimed advantages. But the presence of NFC at a price of $150 may well become a decisive factor in your choice, because wireless payments using your phone are convenient.

3 reasons to buy Honor 8A:

  • you need a smartphone for a schoolboy with enough speed for most games;
  • you want to limit the use of the phone by a child;
  • you need an inexpensive NFC smartphone for contactless payments;
  • You need a camera that can shoot in low light.

1 reason not to buy Honor 8A:

  • small icons in the notification bar will be inconvenient for people with poor eyesight.

Technical characteristics of Honor 8A

Display
IPS LCD, 6.09 inches, 720 x 1560, 283 ppi, 16.7 million colors, capacitive sensor (10 simultaneous touches)

Housing
plastic, dimensions 156.28 x 73.5 x 8.22 mm, weight approximately 150 g

CPU
MTK MT6765 (Helio P35), 8 cores Cortex-A53 (4 cores 2.3 GHz + 4 cores 1.8 GHz), PoverVR Rogue GE8320 graphics

RAM
2 GB

Flash memory
Built-in - 32 GB (approximately 24 GB available to the user), removable - microSD

Camera

Primary: 13 megapixel, F1.8, phase autofocus, LED flash.

Video: 1080p@30 fps, 17 Mbps, stereo sound 44.1 kHz 32 bit

Front: 8.0 MP, F2.0

Interface
microUSB

Wireless technology
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC

GPS
GPS/A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS

Battery
Li-Ion, non-removable, 3020 mAh

operating system
Android 9.0 with proprietary EMUI 9 shell

SIM card
2 x nanoSIM (both support 3G/4G/VoLTE)

The fingerprint scanner
on the back panel

Honor 8A

Will not make you regret the money spent if the child loses it

Smartphone budget A-series is equipped with 6.09-inchscreen with a drop-shaped notch, 13-megapixel main camera, 8 megapixel front camera, MTK MT6765 processor and 2/32 GB of memory. It has separate connectors for two SIM cards, a 3020 mAh battery, a fingerprint scanner and NFC. And it all runs on Android 9.0.

Buy at Comfy

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smartphone for schoolchildren