Huawei Honor U8860 Hands-on and Review

Today we will be reviewing Huawei Honor which comes to the Indian market with a price tag in the range of 20K putting it in competition with some high end devices like HTC Sensation, Sony Xperia Arc S and recently launched HTC one V. Huawei is still a new brand when it comes to smartphones or Android based devices and hence often the expectations are low with Huawei devices. Huawei Honor did surprised us as it performed much better than we expected if you compare it with other smartphone models in the same price range.

Specifications, Hardware and Performance

Huawei Honor comes Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) with a whopping 4-inch FWVGA high-resolution display powered by 1.4GHz single-core Scorpion processor, 1900mAh battery and a whopping 8-megapixel auto-focus Primary Camera with HDR to capture HD Quality Photos, Videos and a Secondary front Camera of 0.3 Megapixel.

The Phone comes with plastic body  and back cover with matte finish with a textured surface with  Power button at the top, a volume rocker button at the side and 3.5mm jack for earphones. It comes with four touch sensitive keys instead of hard physical buttons i.e. options, home, return and search.

We have just taken a screenshot for Specifications of the Phone using the AnTuTu Benchmark tool which we are going to use later to test the Phone performance for various parameters.

 4-inch High-Resolution Gorilla Glass Display

The first thing that you notice in this phone is the 4-inch High-Resolution Gorilla Glass Display making it a great phone in this Price range. As many of you may know, Gorilla Glass is thin, light, damage-resistant and has outstanding optical clarity &  used for HD, 3D television displays.

Lock Screen

Lock screen of Huawei Honor gives you easy and direct access to Camera, Phone, messages and Calls just by unlocking the lock screen without touching any other button.

Power saving mode, Data Monitor and other Apps

Huawei Honor comes with many inbuilt apps like Power saving mode, Data Monitor and many other Apps about which I already talked about in my earlier review of Huawei IDEOS X5. Using the Data Monitor app can help you keep track of your monthly mobile data usage and keep it under limit saving your hard earned money in case you are about to exceed your data Plan.

It also includes a Security Guard App which can help you get rid of unwanted calls and spam SMS messages. It can help you white-list, blacklist numbers helping you manage all your calls and messages much better on the Phone. Even though many Call blocker Apps are available in Android Market, but either they need root access to get installed or they are paid apps. Hence this security guard is a great App if you receive too many unwanted calls or messages.

Camera

It has both Primary (8MP with HDR support) capable of capturing 720p videos and Secondary (0.3 MP) Camera. I am not a good photographer and hence I wont be able to comment too technically on the quality of the pictures taken by Camera. If we forget the technical details, the pictures taken by the Camera are great.  Even though it comes with a good flash support, still Pictures taken are much better when the ambient lighting is good. But honestly, we shouldn’t compare the Mobile camera flash and its quality with a normal camera flash.

Battery Life

Huawei Honor comes with great Battery life powered by  1900mAh battery.To test it rigorously, We tested it on a big event for full day. It was a big event (Pepsi Change the Game T20 Finale) and Huawei honor lasted for full day when we used it for almost full day even after clicking too many photographs and videos with it, using it as a WiFi hotspot for my iPad for few hours, tweeting on it and even few calls.

And if you want the Honor smartphone to last much longer, just enable the Power Save mode of the Phone and it will automatically manage all your battery intensive features like Data, Bluetooth, brightness etc. without any input needed from the user.

For normal to average usage of the Phone, the battery lasts for 2-3 days easily.

Benchmark Scores

After all the normal usage, it was time to run some Benchmark tests on Huawei Honor. We ran these tests using three benchmark tools namely AnTuTu, Quadrant and Neocore. I have put the benchmark scores screenshot below and  these scores do give you a overall feel about where the Phone stands when it comes to competition.

While comparing these Benchmark scores, you must keep in mind the price range of the devices and comparisons should be made with devices in the same price range.

As you can see from the scores, Huawei Honor performs well with devices like Samsung Galaxy S, Google Nexus S and is only behind devices like Samsung Galaxy SII which is a much high end device and costs at least Rs. 5000 more compared to Huawei Honor. The Neocore benchmark score of 60.1 FPS too tells us that device performs great if you consider graphics performance. Keep in mind here that Neocore scores alone never tell you the full story.

Conclusion

We were using this device for at least two weeks and we have tested it extensively except playing too much games on it. Some issues that do need some work from Huawei include better design of hard buttons like volume rocker and Power buttons, & a much needed Ice cream Sandwich upgrade (hopefully its coming soon as promised by Huawei).

Hence if you are planning to buy a Android Phone with some great hardware, Gorilla glass screen and a whopping 8 MP camera, with a budget of ~20K+, then Huawei Honor can be a Good choice for you.

The only issue that I am not sure of about Huawei is how good their after sales service support is all over India, though they do include a inbuilt support App on Phone using which you can get access to Huawei support without searching for any numbers here and there.

You can buy Huawei Honor from online e-retails stores like Amazon India.

Specifications