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In appearance, Honor Play very much resembles the hit of this season: the Huawei P Smart+ smartphone. Same chassis: same dimensions and
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Comparison of Huawei P Smart + and Huawei Honor Play
Despite their very similar appearance, these are twocompletely different smartphones. Which, however, does not mean at all that Huawei P Smart+ is worse. It was simply created for a different target audience, and is in a different price category. I am sure that the branded gradient color, together with the price, more than covers all the shortcomings of this model (and they are only shortcomings in the eyes of geeks), and P Smart+ buyers are quite satisfied with their purchase (and even more so with the price). That being said, there is one thing where the P Smart+ is technologically ahead of the Honor Play. And this also fits perfectly with its target audience (Honor Play buyers, on the contrary, will remain indifferent to it) - this is taking selfies with the front camera. Firstly, the P Smart+ has a double camera (and the main module is 24-megapixel), and secondly, it supports HDR.
Honor Play offers in our market two colorhousing options: black and purple. Both are metal (because of this, Honor is a bit heavier than its twin, but these 7 grams of difference are hardly easy to determine "by eye") and dull, for which Honor marketing specialists are particularly grateful.
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What you need to know about the appearance of Honor Play
The main dual camera is placed in a verticalorientation (hello, you know what). The second 2-megapixel module in this case is used only to create bokeh, and works, if not delightful, then perfectly, using all these wonders of neural techno-magic. About this very magic reminiscent of AI Camera next to the LED flash. The front-facing camera is placed in the traditional neckline (everyone who is angry with him traditionally reminds you that you can turn it off in the settings and forget about its existence).
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The metal case saved mine specificallycopy from repeated falls on the floor, including tiles. Over the course of a couple of months of use, the phone fell out of my clumsy hands probably a couple of dozen times. As evidenced by the characteristic scratches on the corners of the case and my annihilated nerve cells.
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The design of the smartphone can probably be called“Frameless”, but it is worth understanding that in the modern world this concept is interpreted by all manufacturers rather frivolously. However, to the credit of the manufacturer, Honor Play is not positioned anywhere as frameless. The widest part of the frame is located at the bottom of the screen, and it is sufficient to accommodate the Honor logo.
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Probably the only thing that canWhat will piss off a seasoned geek in this smartphone is that it has a hybrid tray for SIM cards: either a second SIM card or a memory card. I personally don’t remember the last time I inserted a memory card into a smartphone, but there is a certain type of people for whom this is important. I cannot blame them for this, although I myself am indifferent to this issue.
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What is the Honor Play screen
If you have not yet mastered the skills of reading thesetricky charts, we have a great article on our website about how we measure the quality of screens and what all those graphs mean. In short, the color gamut of the Honor Play screen looks better than that of its twin - it almost coincides with the ideal sRGB, sagging just a little in the green and red parts of the spectrum. The color temperature is close to the reference value of 6500K, but still goes into cool, blue tones. Moreover, the darkest color goes into the cold color more. The third graph of color components is absolutely beautiful: green is almost perfect, and blue slightly predominates over red (let me remind you that ideally all three graphs should coincide and be on the same level with the gray dotted line). Note the low color error values (purple graph). The screen brightness ranges from 0.481 cd/m2 (this is too much, there is no deep black color) for a black field to 343.62 cd/m2 for a white field. The contrast is 714:1. In general, the screen cannot be called very bright, but it has good color rendering - for which we all appreciate IPS matrices, while at the same time getting all the accompanying disadvantages in the form of low contrast and overexposed blacks (especially in comparison with AMOLED).
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What is the performance of the Honor Play
Every time I'm in the process of working onWith another smartphone review, I’m “moving” to a mid-level model, I’m experiencing discomfort due to the fact that the phone’s performance is becoming lower than I’m already used to. Sometimes this manifests itself strongly, sometimes weakly. It is worth saying that in the last couple of years, the difference between a flagship smartphone and a mid-range device has become smaller than before. In the case of Honor Play (one cannot say that this is a surprise, if inside there is the flagship processor of last year, the Kirin 970, which is not at all outdated - the first model on the next processor had not even appeared on sale at the time of publication of this review) I did not feel any -reduced performance or slowdown compared to top-end smartphones. Of course, after a year of using the smartphone (this happens year after year, with all flagships), after installing dozens of applications, thousands of photos in memory and other joys of use, this performance will no longer please the buyer as much as in the first month. But the result is obvious: in AnTuTu Honor Play shows 204,312 points, which is comparable to last year’s flagships: Huawei Mate 10, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8 and Huawei P20. Once again, I’ll draw a parallel with the Huawei P Smart+, which scored 131,431 points: despite all the external similarities (in terms of chassis, these are clones), these are two completely different smartphones, with a fundamental difference in performance. Tests in the PC Mark and 3D Mark benchmarks show similarly good results. This, in fact, is the advantage of the Honor brand, which has always been distinguished by its excellent price-technical characteristics ratio. Although this usually concerned one model per year - with the X index, which, starting with Honor 4X, received editorial awardsgg. Today, the Honor lineup is much wider,than 3-4 years ago and Honor Play surpasses the newest Honor 8X in both performance and price. Just because the model 8X plays on another field - where there is a massive sale. In the end, not everyone needs a smartphone for 10,000 hryvnia (and not everyone can afford it).
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How long does Honor Play work?
Regular readersggremember that I find the strangest question“how long does the battery last” of a smartphone, simply because all people are different, with different usage scenarios and a different set of installed (and simultaneously running, as well as running in the background) applications. And even with the same set of applications, these indicators will be different, because someone follows 200 people on Twitter, and someone follows 2000. I’m generally silent about Facebook - it’s one of the main enemies of our time for smartphone batteries. I’ll just give a graph of battery discharge on one of the usual working days. The smartphone on the chart worked for almost 24 hours, but was on charge for just under an hour when the charge dropped below 50%. If we translate these graphs into simple language, then on a normal day the smartphone is discharged in the evening, but under heavy load during the working day (we are not talking about working at a computer, but in a scenario where the smartphone serves as a work computer, as well as a camera, in fully mobile mode) may not make it until 6 p.m. This figure is worse than that of the same Mate 10, but the battery capacity of 3750 mAh versus 4000 does not affect the situation much, but certainly does not worsen it.
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How does the camera Honor Play
It is worth saying that since the release of the processorKirin 970, which was called by Huawei "the world's first processor with artificial intelligence" I am extremely interested in how much all these AI games in smartphones (with support from the operating system) make sense for the end user. Therefore, my main shooting mode is AI. And I must say that I “with a feeling of deep satisfaction” note serious progress in image processing, even using this particular processor as an example. The new gallery interface has a separate AI button, which allows you to see what a photo looks like before and after processing by trained neural networks. It’s worth saying that if you copy pictures directly from the phone’s memory, then, oddly enough, they are stored there in processed form. But you can pull out the original if you share this photo directly from the Gallery application (for example, by sending the source to Dropbox). You can see what the processing looks like in the picture below. Here you can see the comparison expanded to full screen. As you can see, the bokeh effect works, if not perfectly (the brush on the Maine Coon’s right ear is not processed accurately), then very well. But the beauty of the processing is not only in the blurring of the background, but also in the color correction.
On these histograms you can see what exactly the smart, specially trained, algorithms of the AI mode draw.
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Shooting on the street
For a better understanding of the camera, I sharedall the interesting pictures in several sections. All these pictures in the original resolution (including pictures before and after processing by automation) can be seen in a special gallery on the Torba. This is how, for example, shooting on the street looks like - the easiest type of shooting, since in the bright sun today even the camera of a completely budget phone shoots well. Pay attention to the bokeh effect in frames with a dog - he is there everywhere.
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Indoor shooting
I remember the times when phone cameras were goodThose who coped with shooting in sunlight were generally unable to take an unblurred picture indoors. Today these times are long gone. And the phone camera can take pictures in any lighting conditions. By the way, an interesting report about how the newest Nova Poshta terminal works was filmed with the Honor Play camera. And there almost all the pictures were taken indoors.
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Night shooting
Shooting in low light conditions is the mostthe main criterion in which now there is a struggle among manufacturers of mobile cameras. In fairness, the war there is not only at the level of matrices (they need less and less light), but also at the level of processing algorithms that reduce digital noise (graininess) and increase the dynamic range of images. Here is an example of shooting at dusk on the street with and without flash. Just to remind you that the phone’s camera flash performance is limited to 2-3 meters to the object. Of course, you will not be able to illuminate, say, the stadium.
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Starting from the camera Huawei P20, manufactureruses a special night mode. In practice, the camera takes several pictures with different exposures. Something like the process of shooting in HDR mode in its first guises: the shooting takes a few seconds, not the share, as it removes HDR today. But the beauty of the situation for the consumer is that the camera no longer needs to be fixed on a tripod - can be removed from the hands. The first shot is shot in normal mode. The second is in Night mode. That is, if you shoot Honor Play at night, do not forget to turn on this mode.
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Here are some more shots taken in night mode. The lights are especially beautiful (I repeat, everything was filmed without a tripod):
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But even in the usual (more precisely in AI) mode, you can get interesting pictures:
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Video shooting
Shooting a camera phone in 4K is no onesurprising, but just to remind you that Honor Play can shoot FullHD video at 60 frames per second, and can shoot in 4K (3840x2160). As an example of video filming, I chose a video from a club concert - this is the usual FullHD mode:
Another camera Honor Play can shoot video in SlowMotion. Videos are short, but funny. Below is a small playlist with examples. Of course, the most effective way is to shoot all sorts of extreme sports with jumps, and this is all for everyone - there is a place to experiment. The SloMo mode works in two versions: manual timing and automatic - a square appears in the camera interface, and shooting with a high frame rate is activated when an object appears in this square. An example of the work is in the review of Huawei P Smart +. I would also add that the video can be recorded with the new H.265 codec (but the usual H.264 is also supported)
Selfie camera
The popularity of selfie cameras can be compared topopular karaoke. At first it seems to us that no one uses them, and then we observe how everyone (on the sly and not very much) begins to use absolutely everything. Therefore, I decided to highlight the pictures taken by the front camera in a separate block.
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What else can the Honor Play camera do? In the Pro mode of the camera, you can also enable recording of the image in RAW, if you suddenly like it. Additional shooting modes hide all the fun:
- Panorama - a shooting mode that has already become standard,you need to smoothly move the camera along the indicated arrows in the interface. Not suitable for shooting 360-degree panoramas (in such cases I shoot with the Google Street View application, there is such an option)
- The length of time (what is called TimeLapse) - slow mode, allows you to effectively take, for example, sunsets or the movement of clouds across the sky
- Watermark - just adds water to the framea sign (there is an interesting library of stickers, there is where to experiment, I once talked in detail about it in the Huawei P9 detailed review, little has changed there)
- Artist (filters like the ones made popular by the Prisma app don’t work as cool, but show a real-time preview before shooting)
- Download is not a shooting mode, but a separate menu where you can load additional shooting modes, now there are three of them: Delicious Food, Watermark and Scanner (I have already installed all three)
- Night is the magic night mode for handheld shooting.
- HDR - everything is clear, this is a shooting mode with an extended dynamic range, but with the advent of AI mode, it already loses its meaning
- 3D panorama - technically, this is just an animation (using the Fyuse engine, you can install the application on Google Play), there is also where to experiment
- 3D models - face digitization and transformation modehim in a 3d model. The first such experiments began to make Sony. So far this is all self-indulgence, but perhaps in the future there will be some interesting "breakthroughs", however, the regime is still niche, for fans
- Slowdown is the very slo motion
- Pros - shooting mode for those who understand photos: you can manually adjust the exposure, focus and exposure compensation, in this mode you can record RAW
- Light is another mode for experimenters who allows to draw pictures in a dark room with a light source. My hands never got to remove something decent, and there’s no point in showing obscene
- Filter - the usual filters used in the cameras after the appearance of Instagram in our life
- Scanner - the mode of shooting texts for recognition
- Delicious food - theoretically should improve the appearance of food, but there is nothing more to say about this, it was not useful
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I can also say that if suddenly you are impressedselfie modes of the Huawei P Smart+ camera, then Honor Play also has all this cute nonsense. With the exception of HDR in the front camera (this is a proprietary feature of P Smart+ specifically).
In the dry residue
Honor Play is an exceptionally successful modelsmartphone, which I find today is the best in the price category up to 10,000 hryvnia. This model is definitely made for geeks and everyone who understands what technical characteristics are needed for what (and plans to use them). It has everything we love: NFC and contactless payments, a USB-C connector, dual-band Wi-Fi, a metal body and a well-calibrated IPS display. It's worth knowing that this smartphone is equipped with the flagship Kirin 970 processor installed in Huawei's flagships of last year (they still cost twice as much as the Honor Play, which makes it a good buy). What impressed me most was the progress of the camera, or rather the work of the AI, which even managed to become more interesting than that of the Huawei Mate 10. And now you can judge it for yourself. The logical result of all this is an editorial awardgg"We recommend."
3 reasons to buy Honor Play:
- the best offer on the market with a price tag of 10,000 hryvnia;
- everything we love: NFC, USB-C, dual-band Wi-Fi;
- magic camera that can compete with the flagships.
2 reasons not to buy Honor Play:
- your budget does not reach 10,000;
- You already have a smartphone with the same features.
Honor Play
best smartphone for 10,000 hryvnia
The best smartphone in its price category: metal case, flagship processor, large 6.3-inch IPS-screen with high resolution, support for contactless payments via NFC, reversible USB-C connector and dual-band Wi-Fi. One of the best cameras on the market, able to compete with the flagship models of this year. Ability to evaluate the functions of AI when shooting: object recognition, automatic color calibration and background blur. Well-deserved reward "we recommend."
we recommend
Technical characteristics of Honor Play
Dimensions
158x75x8 mm
Weight
176 g
CPU
Hisilicon Kirin 970: 4 cores Cortex-A73 2.4 GHz 4 cores Cortex-A53 1.8 GHz with Mali-G72 MP12 graphics
Display
IPS, 6.3″, 2340x1080 pixels, aspect ratio 19.5:9, density 409 ppi
Memory
64 GB + microSD up to 256 GB, RAM 4 GB
Main camera
dual: 16 MP f/2.2 aperture + 2 MP f/2.4 aperture
Front-camera
d16 MP aperture f/2.0 + 2 MP
Wireless technology
Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz, Wi-Fi Direct, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, A2DP, LE, EDR, aptX HD, GPS
Battery
lithium-ion, 3750 mAh, non-removable
operating system
Android 8.1 Oreo + EMUI 8.2
SIM card
2 x nanoSIM (second hybrid slot for microSD)
