Honor is catching up with the leftover empty spaces of the pricing by launching the Honor 8 again in a Lite variant. Honor 8 is, no doubt, one of the best camera phone and one of the best-looking smartphone of the year. Yet, this year, Honor has brought us its Lite variant with the very identical design. Honor 8 Lite packs just about the same stuff we saw in the Honor 6X, but in a different attractive shell. Let’s jump on to the Honor 8 Lite review.
Inside The Box
- Honor 8 Lite with built-in battery
- Micro USB Cable
- Charger (5V, 1A)
- Protective Case
- Earphones
- Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card
- SIM Tray Ejector PIN
Design and Build
From the design point of view, the Honor 8 Lite reiterates the appearance of flagship variant Honor 8. No wonder, it looks exactly the same from a distant, the Honor 8 Lite is clearly inspired from the Honor 8. The looks are appealing and it gets you the same feel of holding the Honor 8 phone, just that the frames aren’t metallic like its upper variant.
There is 2.5D curved glass on both sides fitted on the Honor 8 Lite and that gives it a premium look. The phone itself is compact and uses a slim profile (7.6 mm). As opposed to the glass on the back side, the front glass has seemed to have a rough surface for your finger touches. There is no oleophobic coating on the screen that resists most of your greasy fingerprints.
What surprises me is upon seeing the back of the phone, one camera is missing. Honor 8 Lite sports just a single 12 MP camera on the back. That’s not it, the fingerprint scanner that use to hold a Smart Key is also not there. Considering that this is a Lite variant, there are more things to come that might not sound as good. We also can’t expect everything coming from the Honor 8.
The rear side has a single 12 MP f/2.2 camera with LED flash and an 8 MP f/2.0 selfie camera on the front side with wide angle lens. The navigation buttons are on the screen. The fingerprint scanner is located on the back side as usual. We don’t find the newest type-C port rather using a standard Micro USB port at the bottom.
Moreover, it uses a hybrid SIM tray that holds either two SIMs or single SIM with a MicroSD card for storage expansion. The phone supports 4G network with VoLTE calling. Moving to the sides, the right side holds a power button and volume control. The top side holds a 3.5 mm port for the bundled earphones. The bottom has loudspeakers (right grill) and a Micro USB. Two microphones are located on the top and bottom respectively.
Display
Honor 8 Lite uses a 5.2-inch Full HD screen (1920 x 1080 pixels resolution | 423 ppi) covered with a 2.5D scratch-resistant curved glass that tends to be messy with fingerprints. Touch response is yet doubtful again due to the rough surface.
The display is bright and offers great viewing angles. The colors are good and details are crisp. The visibility under sunlight shade is adequate, you will find an option to increase readability under sunlight. The software offers an Eye comfort feature which filters out blue light to help relieve visual fatigue. You can set color temperature from the Display Settings.
Software & User Interface
Coming to the software Honor 8 Lite offers, HUAWEI has updated their EMUI software to version 5.0 using Android N build. This is the first Honor device to feature an Android 7.0 Nougat operating system. There is a security patch level dated from 1st March 2017. Since EMUI 5.0 is released, Honor 6X might soon get the update.
EMUIs are heavily customized software, we have seen their features and traits on other Honor devices. While this is the new EMUI, expect features from the Android N. You can use the native multi-window, quick reply, and many others. To see what’s new in Android Nougat, check out these top 5 features of Android 7 Nougat.
The newer version offers a new icon pack, smooth animations, and many different settings. EMUIs are still resource hoggers, there is not much change in the RAM usage. Around 2.4 GB of RAM is free to use out of the 4 GB (typical 3.6 GB).
We have covered more about the software in our past reviews of Honor devices.
Fingerprint scanner
The fingerprint scanner is located on the rear side. While using it, the first thing I noticed is the scanner misses out the Smart key found on the Honor 8. The fingerprint scanner is extremely fast, most devices in this price range may not be as fast. The scanner works great, it is accurate, never misses any of my fingers.
Like the rest Honor devices, it also comes with a few fingerprint gestures like taking photos, browsing photos from the gallery, answering calls, stopping the alarm, and bringing the notification panel. It can be accessed in the Fingerprint settings menu.
Hardware, Performance & Gaming
Honor 8 Lite sports a 64-bit octa-core Kirin 655 CPU clocked at 2.1 GHz. There are in total eight Cortex-A53 cores in which four cores are clocked at 2.1 GHz for performance whereas the rest of the four cores are clocked at 1.7 GHz for battery saving. Honor 8 Lite has only one 4 GB LPDDR3 RAM variant with 64 GB of internal storage. This is the same hardware that Honor 6X employs, so the apps should run similar on this device.
Moving to the numbers, the Honor 8 Lite scores some decent points but they weren’t really surprising. AnTuTu scored 56,214 points, Geekbench 4 scored 814 points (Single CPU), 3355 points (Multi CPU), and 2768 points (Mali-T830 MP2 GPU). The Quadrant Standard Edition scored well at 21,499 points.
AnTuTu Benchmark
- 56,214 points
Geekbench 4
- 814 points (single-core CPU)
- 3355 points (multi-core CPU)
- 2768 points (GPU)
Quadrant Standard Edition
- 21,499 points
The gaming on the device is moderate. Not meant for heavy gaming, but it should run many games just fine without any issues. We ran some games like Asphalt Xtreme, Gangstar Vegas, Need For Speed No Limits, and PES2017 – PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER. Consider the performance of the Mali-T830 MP2 merely above the Adreno 506 of Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 or similar to the Honor 6X.
Games Tested on Honor 8 Lite
- Asphalt Xtreme
- Gangstar Vegas
- Need For Speed No Limits
- PES2017 – PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER
As far as the temperature is concerned, we have not found any heating issues with the device.
Storage & Connectivity
The Honor 8 Lite comes with a 64 GB internal storage. The user gets 53.13 GB free space, the rest is reserved for the system. The storage is expandable up to 128 GB via MicroSD on a hybrid SIM slot. You can either use it as a dual SIM phone or single SIM with MicroSD on the SIM2 slot.
According to the benchmarks we performed, the storage performance is slightly below the midrange category phones like Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Moto G5 Plus, Honor 6X and others. Honor 6X clearly wins in this segment. Nothing surprising here, the storage performance is average.
A1 SD Bench
- 179.95 MB/s (Read)
- 82.84 MB/s (Write)
AndroBench
- 191.55 MB/s (Sequential Read)
- 105.53 MB/s (Sequential Write)
- 41.26 MB/s (Random Read)
- 8.33 MB/s (Random Write)
Cameras
Honor 8 Lite equips a single 12 MP f/2.2 camera on the rear side and an 8 MP f/2.0 camera on the front side. The camera specifications appear to be all good on paper for competing against the mid-range budget busters. Though it doesn’t support OIS optical image stabilization and 4K video recording which might seem to be a significant drawback of the camera, it is much expected since its upper variant Honor 8 lacks the same.
What gets me is why Honor decided to place just one camera, not two. Honor 6X comes with dual cameras while HonorLiteite comes with only one considering its upper variant Honor 8 also boasts dual cameras. That said, Honor 8 Lite may not capture bokeh effect images which Honor 6X and Honor 8 are capable of.
Honor 8 Lite Camera Specifications
- Camera: 12 MP f/2.2, PDAF
- Sensor: BSI CMOS
- Optical Image Stabilization (OIS): N/A
- Rear Flash: Single LED
- Features: Geo-tagging, Tap to Focus, HDR, Pro Mode, Panorama, All-focus, Slow-mo, Light Painting Watermark, Audio note, Document scan, Time-lapse, Burst Shot
- Video Recording: Up to 1080p @30 FPS, Slow Motion 480p @120 FPS
- Front Camera: 8 MP, f/2.0,
- Video Recording: Up to 1080p @30fps
- Front Flash: Screen Flash
Talking about the rear camera, the performance is decent for this budget. Honor 8 Lite camera takes very good shots in daylight. The level of detailing and the color reproduction are satisfactory. The camera performance should be somewhere around Honor 6X camera (single camera).
When it comes to the night scenarios, the low-light shots are average, it may even blur in certain lighting conditions. Honor 6X camera is much better in my opinion. It has a Night mode that takes long exposure shots while Honor 8 Lite lacks the night mode. The camera interface is no doubt fully featured, it has a Good Food mode, Light painting, All-focus, Pro mode and many others, but a few modes are still missing that we saw on the Honor 8 and Honor 6X.
Honor 8 Lite takes better selfies. I bet Honor 8 Lite would outperform many smartphones in the selfie camera competition. Its 8 MP camera captures decent wide-angle selfies even in low light as it uses the screen flash for soft lighting.
As for the video, it captures in 1080p at 30fps and slow-motion 480p at 120 fps. Nevertheless, the quality of the videos is still acceptable. The front camera is capable of capturing 1080p videos and Panorama shots.
Below are the images are taken from the Honor 8 Lite.
Honor 8 Lite Camera Samples
Battery Runtime
Honor devices are long runners. No wonder they sport an average battery. Honor 8 Lite packs a 3,000 mAh non-removable battery which sounds to be average as most devices come with such capacity. But unlikely, Honor 8 Lite performs better than many of you expect.
Well, to say how long the battery lasts, The battery runs very good and lasts almost 2 days on medium use. You will likely to witness 50% of battery at the end of the day. It did sound well, however, on using even more with two active SIMs, 4G mobile data and Wi-Fi always On, and occasional use of the Bluetooth got me 1 day 7 hours battery runtime. The good thing, however, was the screen on time which recorded above 4.5 hours.
Out test includes the use of daily apps (YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook & Messenger, Instagram, Email, Xender, SoundCloud, Truecaller, Amazon, and Music) and playing games like Asphalt Xtreme, Gangstar Vegas, Need For Speed No Limits, PES2017 – PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER.
Honor 8 Lite Battery Test Results
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Pricing, Availability, and Warranty
The handset is available at a price of ₹17,999 in Midnight Black color. The phone is available through all offline Honor partner stores across India. As for the Warranty it covers, the Honor 8 Lite comes with a 15-month service warranty along with Honor’s door pick-up and drop after sale facilities.
Verdict – Worth Buy?
We did like the Honor 8 and as far as the design goes, Honor 8 Lite picks up almost everything from its flagship variant. Needless to say, Honor 8 Lite looks very stylish in the hands due to its compact design and glass body. The battery life is the second most thing we like followed by the cameras. The only good thing we will miss in the phone is the dual cameras.
Previously, we reviewed the Honor 8 smartphone, so what we missed on this Lite variant is the dual cameras, Smart Key on the back, USB type-C port, oleophobic coated glass, and fast charging due to its limited charger output (5V, 1A). We have no complaints about its CPU, it packs a Kirin 655 which appears to be close enough to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625.
Considering its price, the things we want to see on the phone on the least side are a type-C USB port, fast charging option, and an oleophobic coating, if not the dual camera. It all sounds like a complete package only if Honor had made them available on the phone.
Potential buyers may want to consider the 64 GB variant of the Honor 6X or the actual Honor 8 which is available at ₹21,500 on Amazon India before you plan to buy the Honor 8 Lite.
Competitors
- Honor 6X (64 GB) – ₹15,999
- Honor 8 – ₹21,500
Strength
- Looks As Stylish As Honor 8
- Very Good Battery Life
- Decent Build Quality
- Fingerprint Scanner Is Accurate
- Decent Camera Package
- EMUI 5.0 (Android N)
- Bundled Earphones and Protective Case
Weakness
- Fingerprint Movements Aren’t Really Smooth, Fingerprint Magnet
- No Dual Rear Cameras
- No Fast Charging (Output: 5V, 1A)
