New flagship Honor phone available from August 24, priced £369.99.
The latest high-end phone from the Huawei-owned Honor brand is officially coming to Europe. At an event in Paris today, Honor announced that the Honor 8 — recently unveiled to an American audience — will be available from today, Aug. 24, priced £369.99 in the UK. Huawei’s vMall outlet will get it first, along with an “anniversary package” of bundled goodies. In addition, the unlocked Honor 8 will be carried by the usual suspects, including Clove, Ebuyer, Expansys and Amazon. (Amazon’s throwing in a free Fire TV stick while stocks last.)
And on the carrier side, Three will offer the Honor 8 for sale “in the coming weeks.”
The Honor 8 brings many of the internals we’re already familiar with from the Huawei P9 family — Huawei’s high-end Kirin 950 chip, 4GB of RAM and a dual-camera setup combining both color and monochrome sensors for improved detail and clarity. Unlike the Huawei phone, the Honor 8 bears no Leica branding, but it appears to be much the same hardware on the inside. Naturally, Honor’s trademark fingerprint security makes a return, with another rear-mounted sensor.
The Honor 8 also sees the brand adopting a new metal-and-glass design language, with a metal trim sandwiched between two sheets of “2.5D” tapered glass. As Daniel Bader explains in our preview of the U.S. model, it’s a surprisingly compelling package.
I didn’t expect to be as impressed by the Honor 8 as I am. While I haven’t been able to do sufficient battery testing to determine whether the 3000mAh battery lives up to the competition, the phone has shown promise, refusing to drop below 20% in any of the days I’ve used the phone.
More than that, the Honor 8 consistently performs well, has a great screen, and captures fantastic photos, at a price that is sure to be significantly lower than the phone it is gunning for — the Galaxy S7.
The Honor 8’s launch price is a good bit higher than previous Honor phones, reflecting the improvements in build quality and higher-end internals than previous offerings such as the Honor 7 and 5X. The key difference between the U.S. and British pricing is that it’s more expensive than major rival OnePlus in the UK, whereas the American price tag of $399 exactly matches the OnePlus 3.
We’ll have more impressions on the European Honor 8 coming soon, as well as comparisons with its Huawei-branded brethren, so stay tuned. (We’re also updating our Instagram story live from the event, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
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