Honor Pad 8 Review: The Best Entertainment Tablet

The Honor Pad 8 is Honor’s first foray into tablets and to say that they’ve gone above and beyond with the Pad 8 is an understatement.

The Pad 8 is by all intents and purposes one of the best entertainment purposed tablets we’ve used.

There’s a lot of reasons to consider the Pad 8. An all metal unibody design, a beautiful 12-inch 2K full view display, 8 DTS speakers and an impressive all day battery life. These are just some of the many reasons why the Pad 8 is a solid tablet so let’s a look a little deeper.

Design

Starting off with the chassis, the Honor Pad 8 has a metal body and comes in the Dawnlight Blue colour scheme which is subtle and nice to look at. The back plating is also sandblasted, which feels good on the hands too. Despite having a large 7250mAh battery packed in, the Pad 8 weighs just about 520 grams. There’s a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera for calls.

Display

On the front is a 12-inch IPS 2K Fullview Display with Eye-care technology. The screen frame comes in at 6.9 mm with its narrow bezel and allows for a screen ratio of 87% at a resolution of 2000x1200 pixels.

So rather than a 16:9 aspect ratio, this is 5:3 allowing for wider viewing. It displays up to a billion colours in display reproduction so visually speaking this screen will serve well in multiple scenarios. Its brightness peaks at 350 nits which will easily handle harsh outdoor lighting.

The Honor Pad 8 has also been awarded TUV Rheinland’s Low Blue Light and Flicker Free certifications. A huge push is being made to make displays safer for viewing especially considering children at a young age are now on devices more than ever and given how digital education is becoming, this has become a requirement and one that Honor is committed to.

Performance

With good looks and good display comes top tier performance in its class. The Pad 8 runs on a Qualcomm 7nm 8 core CPU, and you can get two models, a 4GB RAM model with a 128GB in memory storage. It supports 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands on Wi-Fi has Bluetooth 5.1 and USB Type C.

On the software end it runs on the latest Magic UI 6.1 based on Android 12 with a huge focus on smart multi-window and multi-screen capabilities as well as giving a better overall user interface.

There’s a huge emphasis on developing a cross platform ecosystem between mobile and tablet. The multi-screen collaboration allows for instant file sharing between your Honor devices, and this comes in handy especially when you are video editing. Or if you want to bring up your phone apps on a bigger display, multi-screen also allows you to do so on the Pad 8.

The split screen application and can also display up to 4 apps on the Pad 8. And finally, the app extender lets you navigate between different apps while staying on the same page.

And finally charging performance, with that large 7,250mAh battery, the Pad 8 should easily give you a full day’s worth of battery on regular use. If that’s not enough the 22.5 W Fast charger will charge the Pad 8 fully within 2 hours.

Sound

Honor Pad 8 is packed with 8 speakers across the back. What makes it particularly unique is the fact that Honor has collaborated with DTS and IMAX to deliver movie grade sound and visuals as it was intended to be seen and heard. The software also can simulate multiple channels of audio output, to create a 9.1 channel home theatre system.

There’s also a nice added touch, Honor have also added scene recognition so it can tell if you’re watching a film or watching a class if you’re a student making the sound feel more natural in both cases.

Verdict

For their first tablet entry, Honor have done great! It takes on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A8 and Huawei’s Mate pad 10.4 offering some key advantages over the two. The Pad 8 is designed to be a tablet for students, those who enjoy movies and those who are power users who need to work across different devices. It looks, performs, and sounds great which easily put this on our recommended tablets this year.

With solid internals, great battery and software to match, the Honor Pad 8 is an all-in-one solution for many users.

The Honor Pad 8 will be priced between 1200 to 1500 AED for the 4GB + 128GB model and will retail on September 24. Pre-orders begin from September 20 until the 23rd. If you pre-order the Honor Pad 8 customers will also get the Honor Pad 8 magnetic keyboard for free.

For more details kindly visit https://www.hihonor.com/ae