Honor 8A Review: The First Smartphone for Your Child

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

small price, high quality, richfunctionality, and a new name, more harmonious for our ears, apparently, also played a role. The company has officially presented the novelty - 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).

</ img>

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.

</ img>

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.

</ img>

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

</ img>

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

</ img>

Equipment

The “motor” for the Honor 8A is the Mediatek Helio P35- a fairly powerful system-on-chip, made on 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 a frequency up to 680 MHz. RAM - the minimum required (2 GB), the internal drive provides the user with about 24 of 32 GB of flash memory. Despite the support for Wi-Fi standard ac stated in the chipset's specifications, the smartphone only works on b / g / n networks and does not see access points with a frequency of 5 GHz.

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

Purely subjective claims to the image there, towe are accustomed to the coldish shade of the displays. But if you have the time and desire, you can adjust the screen better. To do this, the settings have three presets - by default, warm and cold, as well as a more subtle manual setting. In the “Heat” mode, we already have a smaller variation in color components, and the maximum brightness and contrast values are a couple percent lower.

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

</ img>

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:

</ img>

Remember, I said that the design of the back of the phone “under the camera” - this is no accident? So, the main camera of the Honor 8A is clearly from a higher price category. She is only one, but what a!

</ img>

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 shots - normal and with HDR:

</ img>

Here are a couple more:

</ img>

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 could not resist and, as in the tests of digital cameras,made a series of shots with different sensitivity from ISO100 to ISO3200 indoors, with diffused light from the window in cloudy weather. It is better to download them to a computer and look at 1: 1, so they are posted in a separate gallery.

That's how Honor 8A takes a photo:

</ p>

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 on Android 9 withproprietary shell EMUI (also the ninth version). For applications, there is a separate searchable menu, the most popular actions for applications can be launched by tapping and holding. Some heaped animated widgets are not here, just a few different effects when flipping through the pages of the desktop. After setting up the desktop, you can lock it so that icons and widgets are not moved during random 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:

</ img>

The screencast button is available in the switch panel:

</ img>

Of the additional features I want to mention“Digital balance” settings section - there you can view phone usage statistics, screen time, which applications started. You can limit (both for yourself and for the child, with PIN-code protection) the total time of working with the phone, the time of using individual applications, or block any of them altogether.

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 is positioning the model 8A as the firstsmartphone for the student. Yes, this is a good option with a more than justified price, and the “Digital Balance” function would be most welcome in this case, but many parents would prefer to buy the child “for slaughter” something even cheaper, up to 3000 UAH, so that it was not so pitiful when the child breaks it, drown or lose it. Honor 8A, as it seems to me, will most likely fit the role of an upgrade after such an extra-budget model. It seems that it will also be a good choice for an adult who has many different expenses (family, children, car, hobby) and an expensive phone does not fit into an overstrained family budget. Such a buyer is not interested in top-notch, but simply sufficient performance and functionality, without overpayment for unclaimed benefits. But the presence of NFC at a price of $ 150 may well be the deciding factor when choosing, because wireless payments using the phone is 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 about 150 g

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

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, 44.1 kHz stereo sound 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 a proprietary shell EMUI 9

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

The fingerprint scanner
on the back

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

Buy at MOYO

Buy at TTT

Buy in Allo