Honor 8C Review: Strong Contender In The Sub 15k Segment

Honor 8C Rear View

Honor has been moving from strength to strength in the past two years in India. Huawei’s sub-brand has cultivated a great strategy of coming out with handsets that have the right mix of features and aggressive pricing that make them very compelling to the buyers. Keeping with the same trend, they have come up with the Honor 8C that is a strong device. I spent some time with the handset and here is my review

The first thing that catches your eye with the device is the attention to detail in design and crafting. Honor is known for setting design trends in the segments that it operates and the Honor 8C is no exception. The phone looks and feels premium. Plastic has been used in an innovative way here, the rear finish looks and feels like premium glass and the psychedelic color that the brand says has been inspired by cat’s eyes does look great. The device can easily take on top end handsets with it’s clean lines and symmetry. There is a notch that houses the front camera and the soft front flashlight. The light also doubles as the notification light. Like always, Honor has delivered on build, design and material selection.

With a 6.26-inch Notch FullView Display and an 86.6% screen-to-body ratio, Honor 8C maximizes your view on a slim smartphone body. The edge-to-edge 19:9 display design ensures pleasant experiences when you watch movies or play games. If you don’t want the “notch” to affect your viewing experience, you can easily turn it off for different apps according to your preference.

Video loops and pictures are great. The colors are punchy and well fleshed out. Sunlight visibility is great and viewing angles are great for reading too. The display ticks all the right boxes in my books.

Honor 8C Rear Camera

You can change the notch setting to maximize the usage of screen to include the notch or hide the notch for better viewing experience. You can also change this setting for individual apps.

 Go to Settings > Display > Notch > Custom. Change the notch setting manually for different apps.

Honor 8C Display

One of the things I liked a lot is the battery on the device.  Honor 8C comes with a large 4,000mAh battery that gives you greater convenience and uninterrupted experience when you use your phone. The battery life is enough for a typical user to use the smartphone for two days on a single charge. You can extend it further by enabling power saving mode.

Go to Settings > Battery. You can enable Power Saving Mode or Ultra Power Saving Mode to save more power. You can also optimize your apps’ power usage to achieve even longer battery life.

Honor 8C Notch Display

Honor 8C has a new generation eye comfort mode certified by TüV Rheinland that can reduce blue light radiation emitted by the screen to prevent eye fatigue. You can also schedule eye comfort mode during chosen periods in the day, e.g. an hour before bed time.

Go to Settings > Display > Eye comfort. You can enable eye comfort mode, adjust the color temperature and schedule start time and end time of eye comfort mode for everyday use

Honor 8C Side View

Honor 8C features an artificial intelligence (AI) camera which recognizes over 500 scenarios in 22 categories, and optimizes settings and enhances photo quality based on what users are shooting. The new smartphone has a high-definition dual 13-megapixel and 2-megapixel rear camera with large F/1.8 aperture, and 8-megapixel front facing cameras with a selfie toning light.

The smartphone uses AI and high dynamic range (HDR) to dramatically improve photo quality. By combing multiple frames into one and brightening up faces, both the environment and faces are clear and vivid even in a dim environment or with a strong backlight. Honor 8C also comes with an augmented reality (AR) lens feature which creates interesting photos for social sharing.

Honor 8C Side View

Touch the AI icon on the upper right-hand corner to turn on the AI shooting mode. The camera automatically detects different objects in the photos and optimizes setting accordingly. Try shooting people and other objects in a dim or backlight environment to see the effects

When you turn on the front camera, click the light bulb icon at the upper left-hand corner. You can enable selfie toning light by clicking “Soft flash” on the pull-down menu, and adjusting brightness of selfie toning light on the brightness bar. The light is not a harsh flash that blinds you, it is a persistent soft light that actually helps a lot with improving the overall lighting for a selfie. This is a nifty feature for the young ones.

Here are a few sample pictures I took with the phone.

Honor 8C is powered by high-performance octa-core Snapdragon 632 chipset. With smart user interface EMUI 8.2, the smartphone runs smoothly even if used for a long period of time.

Honor 8C Bottom View

I was able to play uninterrupted with Game suit with 2 innovative modes to choose from

  • Game acceleration mode (maximum resources will be allocated to play game)
  • uninterrupted gaming (all notification will be blocked while playing games)

The phone is a great performer. It takes a lot of multi-tasking and heavy gaming – there are no stutters or lag. The phone runs cold in most cases and does not heat up when used for prolonged times. It fits into your hand and the budget easily. The device also looks good and turns heads when you pull it out to answer calls. Honor has another solid device here.

There are two variants  4GB + 32GB at INR 11,999 and 4GB + 64GB at INR 12,999 variants exclusively on Amazon India

Verdict

Starting at a price of INR 11,999, the Honor 8C is a solid option in the Sub 15k segment. It is a great mix of performance, design, battery and camera. Will give a tough fight to the Redmi series in this segment.

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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