The Honor 8X is a 6.5-inch handset with a 1,080-by-2,340 resolution. According to Huawei, the Honor 8X’s screen covers 91 percent of the front of the device, although our favoured screen-to-body ratio calculator puts it at (a still impressive) 84.3 percent. It’s undeniably a big phone.
The Honor 8X has the notch for the front camera that no modern smartphone is seemingly now without; you can hide this if you don’t like it, but it didn’t bother me. The quality of the IPS LCD screen itself is good, if occasionally lacking a bit of crispness compared to true flagship phones, and perhaps not quite as bright as some.
There’s a fingerprint reader at the back which proved to be consistently accurate and fast. Facial recognition is also available if you want to access your phone that way.The handset is powered by Huawei’s octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 710 chipset, which has four 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 and four 1.7GHz Coretx-A53 CPU cores, plus a Mali G51 GPU. Along with 4GB of RAM, this keeps everything moving very well considering the price. There’s 64GB of internal storage, expandable via MicroSD card.
There are two cameras at the back — a 20MP unit with an f/1.8 wide-angle lens plus a 2MP depth sensor — and a 16MP front-facing selfie camera with an f/2.0 lens. Now-standard features like portrait mode with bokeh (sharp subject, blurred background) work reasonably well. Honor makes much of the 8X’s AI functionality that can recognise 22 different object categories and adjust the image settings accordingly. It’s a nice enough idea: in my experience it tends to brighten the colours of images and make them more exciting — if perhaps a little lurid and less realistic. The night mode adds some sharpness to your after-dark images, making for a decent set of options on such an affordable handset.
Big-screen phones need big batteries to run them, and the 3750mAh battery in the Honor 8X duly provides plenty of power to keep the phone running through the day — even with reasonably heavy app usage.