Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will be out today, but the phone will not be having an easy sail across the smartphone industry on its way to pick the top spot.
Of course, the likes of Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, the upcoming Google Nexus 2016 Marlin, the confirmed LG V20 and a bunch of other smartphones will also be around looking to claim the same spot as the Galaxy Note 7. However, not so many expected a serious contender for this phablet market’s top spot to come from China’s Huawei or rather, the company’s Honor branch.
There is no doubt that Huawei has been magnificent in the smartphone market, especially since it came to be known for its heroics with the Nexus 6P last year. It has followed this success with the release of Huawei P9 as well as a Huawei Honor 8 – two handsets that showcase the power of dual-lens camera systems. However, none of these devices can probably beat the power of the Huawei Honor Note 8 when it comes to display size, performance, and even specs, just to name but a few.
The Huawei Honor Note 8 is official in China, but there is no mention of when it will be hitting other markets across the globe. If you thought the 5.7 inches of display expected to feature on the Galaxy Note 7 is a large unit, wait until you get in contact with the 6.6-inch Honor Note 8. The handset joins the likes of Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, Sony Xperia XA Ultra as well as the Xiaomi Mi Max in featuring huge displays that basically bridge the gap between smartphones and tablets.
Great display, powerful specs
What makes the new Huawei Honor Note 8 a worthy threat to the upcoming Galaxy Note 7 are the specs and features the phone packs. You will come across a roomy 6.6-inch QHD Super AMOLED display unit with a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, something that should lead to a pixel density of 443ppi – this is a very sharp display you get here.
As usual, Huawei sticks to its own chipsets for all of its smartphones, with the Honor Note 8 picking the latest of them all – a Kirin 955 SoC. This is an octa-core processor that has a clock speed of 2.5GHz and has a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU that is paired with a RAM of 4GB. With Samsung Galaxy Note 7 rumored to be coming with a single storage option of 64GB with room for microSD card expansion, the Honor Note 8 has three storage options of 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB. The microSD card storage doubles as a SIM card slot, which means those who want to use two SIM cards have no option but to go for larger storage variants. Also, be warned that only one SIM card will connect to 3G/4G network at a time, with the other limited to 2G connectivity.
The back of the Huawei Honor Note 8 has a 13MP snapper, which will almost the same size as the 12MP expected on the Note 7. The phone drops the recent dual-lens camera setup that Huawei has used on the P9 and Honor 8, but still, you will come across OIS, LED flash as well as 1080p video recording abilities, which should be a low considering that the Galaxy Note 7 will have 4K video recording capabilities. On the front, you get an 8MP snapper.
The Huawei Honor Note 8 lacks one very essential feature – NFC. With mobile payments taking over, it would have been realistic for Huawei to include an NFC chip inside this phone, but it seems the company had no such plans. Still, you get the future-proof USB Type-C port but is only compatible with USB 2.0. The port will be used to charge the 4500mAh battery unit on board the phone. As for the software, the Huawei Honor Note 8 has Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box but expect an Android 7.0 Nougat update to come probably before this year comes to an end.
As noted earlier, the Huawei Honor Note 8 has just been availed for purchase in China. Here, the phone has a price tag of about $345 for the base model while the high-end model costs $420. To get the mid-range model, which has 64GB of onboard storage, you need about $375.
You can check the official Honor website on how to pre-order for the Honor Note 8.