Honor X8 Review: Best Ram Turbo Phone

The Honor X8 is finally here. The much-awaited device from the smartphone company sees the Honor X8 being released in global markets with a strong emphasis on style but extremely quick and responsive performance thanks in part to its RAM turbo capabilities.

Design

The HONOR X8 has been designed with an ultra slim and lightweight body, coming in at 7.45mm in thickness and weighing only 177 grams. It has a flat-edge design and is rounded on the corners on all four sides, the HONOR X8 fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and can effortlessly slide into small handbags and pockets.

HONOR developed a new and exclusive high-strength but lightweight aluminium alloy mid-frame bezel plate, which reduced the weight of the mid-frame bezel plate by 4g and is 15% thinner than traditional smartphone frames. The material guarantees the durability of the middle frame bracket, protecting it against falling and bending. The HONOR X8 also comes with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, offering a convenient unlock experience. Users can unlock the HONOR X8 in less than a second.

The HONOR X8 is equipped with a 6.7-inch HONOR Full View ultra-thin LCD, supporting a Full High-Definition resolution of 2388x1080 pixels, 16.7 million colours, enhancing clarity, and offering a true-to-life viewing experience, ideal for watching movies, browsing photos or gaming.

HONOR is the first brand in the industry to adopt an industry leading ultra-thin LCD system. The 1.1mm ultra-thin LCD combined with tempered glass ensures increased screen strength while reducing the overall weight of the smartphone.

For advanced visuals, the HONOR X8 features a screen refresh rate of up to 90Hz, enabling a smoother scrolling and gaming experience and ensuring users can enjoy superior picture quality.

It comes in three colours, Midnight Black, Titanium Silver and Ocean Blue.

Camera

The HONOR X8 features a 64MP Ultra-clear Main Camera with a f/1.8 aperture that’s equipped with an intelligent multi-frame synthesis algorithm, users can also capture clearer pictures at a distance, and super clear pictures with clarity at night and in low-light conditions.

In addition, there's a 5MP Wide Angle Camera with a 120-degree angle of view and a f/2.2 aperture, allowing users to capture wider shots. And to complement that, there’s also a 2MP macro camera as well as a 2MP bokeh camera with f/2.4 aperture.

The HONOR X8 is also equipped with a 16MP Front Camera with a f/2.45 aperture and image resolution of 4608*3456 pixels.

Performance

At the heart of this device, the HONOR X8 is powered by the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 680 Mobile Platform, a 6nm advanced processor, which have been designed to deliver superior performance while conserving power.

Purpose-built for extended multimedia play and designed to offer optimized gaming and streaming capabilities, the processor delivers a 25% increase in CPU performance and a 10% increase in GPU performance compared to the previous generation, ensuring users can enjoy faster speeds and a seamless user experience no matter what’s on screen. Delivering a 12% decrease in power and consumption compared to the previous generation and a big 4,000 mAh battery, you can fully expect to use the device with a full day’s worth of battery life. The 22.5W Honor Wired SuperCharge can also charge the device and in just ten minutes of charging, you can use the X8 for up to three hours of video playback.

What makes the Honor X8 really special however is its RAM optimization. The HONOR X8 has an advanced memory capability, and is equipped with HONOR RAM Turbo, (6GB+2GB), an HONOR technology which moves a portion of flash memory to RAM, meaning 6GB RAM can be increased to 8GB RAM.

How this works is that it uses dynamic group compression and super memory flash fusion technology, to extend the capacity of running active Apps in the background of the device. With HONOR RAM Turbo, the operating system prioritizes important and heavy-duty applications including gaming or video and image sharing apps, ensuring users have faster access to their favourite applications and can use the device to its full potential.

Further assisted by HONOR's self-developed compressing technology, the actual performance of 2GB virtual RAM reaches 6GB, according to test results. This technology expands RAM storage by compressing background apps and enabling the HONOR X8 to open more applications without sacrificing on efficiency. So, you can switch from one app to another in their current state without the need to load it up again.

In theory, this means that with the Honor X8, you get a phone that gives you an experience of a phone with 12GB of RAM.

Verdict

As a brand, HONOR has delivered. From its design to its solid performance and great user experience, HONOR's reliable X Series line-up brings HONOR's latest innovations to smartphone users all at an affordable price point which makes the Honor X8 a valuable consideration for this year's smartphone picks in the budget smartphone category. For AED 899, the HONOR X8.