After the release of the fancy but affordable Honor 8 last year, honor releases an upgraded version – Honor 8 Pro this year. We are lucky to get our hands on it, and of course we use it on what we do best – play games.

What is in the box

The Honor 8 Pro package consists of some basic item including the phone itself, a pair of earphones, the charger and USB cable along with a Quick Start Guide. But the box is something else – it comes with a Google Cardboard-style VR headset (we will talk about it later).

The phone body is all metal with glass that curves at the sides. The model we get is in an elegantly-looking Navy Blue (maybe blue is the new black). A fingerprint scanner and dual camera are mounted at the back neatly. It has a large 5.7 inch Quad HD display (an almost perfect screen size for gaming) and just 6.97mm in thickness too.

Honor 8 Pro specifications:

Display

As we mentioned earlier, the Honor 8 Pro equips a stunning 5.7-inch display with 2560 x 1440 resolution (good specs for games with high-quality graphics). Offering 515 pixels per inch pixel density, it can display the games detailed to tiny pixel while providing rich and vivid colours. Gorilla Glass 3 protects it from scratches and shatters too, so even though your finger nails are sharp as knife, you won’t damage the screen easily during gaming.

Performance and Battery Life

With its Kirin 960 octa-core processor (one of the most powerful smartphone chips in the market now) and 6GB RAM, you can play games seamlessly (say bye to lagging – unless your internet is bad). The phone does a good job in handling demanding apps and games.

Some of the game we tested with the phone are Mobile Legends, Dead Effect 2 and Asphalt Xtreme. All of them are able to run smoothly (graphic setting is set to highest) on the phone, proving Honor 8 Pro as a good gaming device.

For the storage part, a total of 64GB internal storage comes with the phone originally. Taking the average mobile game size which is 67.7 MB, you can store over 400 games even after deducting the amount of storage taken by the system itself!

It has a 4,000mAh battery that fits perfectly into the slim device body. Along with the latest SmartPower 5.0 technology, you can use the phone up to 2 days without charging (regular use). The comparison below shows how much battery is used after one hour of non-stop gaming:

We played Mobile Legends continuously for one hour and used up only 15% of battery. This means with 100% battery you can play Mobile Legends for about 6.5 hours!

VR Experience

Usually our phone packages only come with some normal stuff, but Honor 8 Pro gives us something special – a Google Cardboard-style VR headset. You will need to assemble it by yourself, it is easy to assemble but kinda hard to use (difficult to find the right viewing angle and not so comfortable). There is a pre-installed VR apps – Jaunt VR for you to try out its VR functions.

Although the phone could stay cool during gaming, it heats up fast when I am using the VR features.

Conclusion

For a phone priced at MYR 1,999.00(around 467 USD), Huawei Honor 8 Pro is quite a valuable choice (especially for gaming) with its attractive looking and good lineup of features. However the phone lacks an important feature – waterproof ability, which makes a big disadvantage comparing to most of the high-end devices.

There is no stereo sound on speaker as well, so if you care much about the audio performance, you may feel disappointed. But you can offset this by using earphones. For more information, you can check out their official website.