Huawei Honor 8 Pro

Premium build and design, great handling, slim profile and sleek looks.The fingerprint scanner has class-leading speed and accuracy. The LTPS IPS LCD screen has great punch, superb contrast, and brightness. Less than stellar color accuracy, but excellent sunlight legibility for an LCD unit.The Honor 8 Pro delivers solid battery life with an endurance rating of 77 hours.EMUI is a functional Android overlay, even if it has its quirks. The Kirin 960 chipset offers class-leading CPU and GPU performance. The GPU is a bit power-hungry and does run a bit hot, but there are no noticeable consequences to the actual gaming experience.

The multimedia package gets the job done - the gallery benefits from the new Discover tab with GoPro-made Highlights, the image editor is powerful. The music app looks good and works well, but fails to offer an equalizer. Good low-light images, and excellent long exposure photos.Good regular selfies, but the colors came out somewhat dull.4K videos are very detailed, if a little noisy, but the h.265 codec makes for problematic sharing. The 1080p footage is nothing special. The dynamic range on both is just average.

We have the most intriguing blue version to play with. The phone is very thin at sub-7mm, and light for its 5.7” display diagonal, at 184g. For comparison, this is a lighter and more compact device than the 5.5” iPhone 7 Plus, which also carries a dual camera on the back.Honor decided to equip the 8 Pro with a Quad HD LCD display with 2560x1440 pixels resolution, catapulting it straight into flagship category. Thankfully, it was also wise to place a big battery pack on the phone, as Quad HD handsets consistently score much worse in our battery life benchmark than their 1080p counterparts with the same battery capacity.

Thanks to that dual camera setup, Honor 8 Pro offers wide aperture mode for photo and videos, which creates a more pronounced blur in the background of your photos.Unlike the Honor 8, the 8 Pro can capture 4K video with 30fps, thanks to the fast new chipset.All in all, a very solid offer from Honor, and one that would cement its value-for-money reputation, as the 8 Pro can spar with the best of the top-shelf handsets, and come out unscathed.