Honor 8 Review – Huawei’s e-brand smartphone for most ages

Software - Emotion UI 4.1

Software – Emotion UI 4.1

Running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Honor 8 features Huawei’s EMUI 4.1 exactly like Huawei P9. There is no difference whatsoever leaving the camera part which in P9 was a work of collaboration with Leica to tune the software work better with German optics equipment.

Huawei’s EMUI is one of the Android interfaces which is not accepted widely. What people don’t like the most in Emotion UI, is the lack of app drawer which is a standard feature of AOSP (with Google’s default interface) as well as most of the vendors provide this feature in their flavors. There are other factors too which include the iOS like interface – that actually is not a well driven argument, it always reminds me of MeeGo OS instead. For many, its notifications system is also not on par with other which to me is not that bad as well.

Like it or not but Huawei has tried their best to make its user interface and experience completely different from other Android skins which have a lot in common. So if you feel something in EMUI which you don’t see in other Android flavors but a few bits from other platforms then I guess it’s still doing better staying unique among its community while adapting stuff from other platforms.

At every part of the interface you got an option to search for – if you can’t see something instantly. Whether it’s the home screen and you want to search for an app or a contact, or it’s the Settings interface where you have lost to get into something, just type in the search box and you will be taken there.

Starting from the lock screen, the EMUI presents with a simple lock screen that you can swipe from anywhere to any side to unlock the screen. A big digital clock is on the bottom-left corner with the day of week and the date. A shortcut camera icon is on the bottom right corner that, if swipe from this corner, unlocks the screen and takes you to the camera interface directly – which is quite a good feature but it’s present in other OEM’s skins too including some other shortcuts as well.

Lock Screen with Single Wallpaper

Notifications, if turned on from the settings, also show up on the lock screen, swiping a notification away takes you to the relevant app after unlocking the screen. Swiping up from the bottom edge reveals some shortcuts that include music player controls to directly play, pause the song or switch to next or previous number. There’s voice recorder, calculator, flash light, and camera which do not require you to enter pin even if set for unlocking the screen.

A few more options are there which are related to magazine lock, liking a cover image, sharing it instantly from the lock screen, or removing it from the selected cover images. Magazine cover lock, if not set already, can be initiated right from the lock screen by tapping on the “Cover” option that takes you to a set of cover images which you can choose from total of 500 images to randomly switch on the lock screen when you wake up the phone from sleep mode.

Magazine Lock with Random Cover Images

Home screen also offers great flexibility to ease you desire taking from customising it with live widgets and backgrounds to resizing the grid layout to adjust more icons in a row. Down at the bottom of the display it offers a sticky apps/icons row which doesn’t change while swiping through the home screens just like any other user interface.

Folders are pretty common which cover the full screen as an overlay when open. Long tapping at a blank area on the home screen initiates edit mode where you can rearrange the the screens, add/remove them, change the transition how the home screens swipe away, add/remove widgets, change wallpapers or themes. Edit mode can also be triggered by pinching on the home screen. In fact you can change the order of the soft keys (back, home and recent) on navigation bar in settings if you like.

The app switcher is presented in a simple horizontal slider with the app’s last state glimpse along with the current RAM information (free/total). App can be closed by swiping up-side while the down-side will lock the app to keep from closing when you hit “kill all” apps.

EMUI 4.1 on Huawei Honor 8 offers to rearrange your home screen icons in 3 grid layouts with maximum 5 icons in a row or in a column – 4×5 or 5×4 or 5×5. There is an “auto-align” feature that if you move an icon from its place, another icon will take it to realign all the icons without leaving a blank space unlike what you can see in the first screen above – by default this feature is turned off. You can also manually align the home screen by shaking the phone if the “shake” featured is turned on in settings. The badge (notification counter on app icon) can also be turned off on individual apps.

The status bar reflects most of the things going on in the phone and the drop-down panel provides access to the notifications and shortcuts in two separate tabs/sections. Notifications, as told above are really well designed and organised and when applicable, a notification can be expanded by swiping down where you can have access to the actions to respond. On the other hand the “shortcut” section provides 3×3 grid of quick toggles along with a brightness slider.

Phone Manager comes along that offers features to optimise system, manage traffic, filtering incoming calls/texts, monitoring and managing battery consumption and managing notifications for individual apps.  Moreover the notification manager gives you option to control notifications from apps that you don’t want as frequently and the way they notify you (on status bar, banners and/or lock screen).

While the battery manager comes with different types of Power Plans including “Performance” – for best experience with higher power consumption, “Smart” – for standard usage and optimised power, and “Ultra Power Saving” – recommended when battery is low where you are left with the most desirable features of a phone, calling/texting and a few others features to keep you on with the phone for several bonus hours if you don’t have a reach to the charger.

In addition to three power plans above, Huawei offers ROG power saving mode that turns down the FHD display to HD resolution of 1280×720 pixels providing even more life time per charge while keeping the density intact. However you will notice less sharpness mostly in text elements, not significantly though.

Software Update

Software update support is another issue which of course is present with all vendors whether a little or in a serious way. Huawei’s software support is somewhere in between or sometime seriously is an issue. Specially when talking about Honor brand, Huawei has revised its policy this year “to provide customers with access to new features (at least once every three months during the first 12 months) for at least 24 months following each product launch.” Huawei has also mentioned that the company “will keep providing access to security and software updates to fix bugs and enhance user experience in a timely manner.” This sounds good but seriously? The Honor 8 you are now reading about here has the security patch of July 2016 and no update is available for this device yet – that’s real bad.