Honor Note 8 Aims to Make Big Impression in Global Smartphone Market

Huawei is counting on its latest smartphone, the Honor Note 8, to stand out in both China and the U.S. Here’s a look at what the big-screen phone has to offer.

The screen built into the Honor Note 8 is surprisingly large. The device’s display comes in at 6.6 inches and supports up to 16 million colors. The multitouch screen has a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel screen and a whopping 443 pixels per inch. In other words, it’ll deliver an exceptionally attractive screen for those who want a big display.

The Honor Note 8 comes with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, which allows it to support Google Play, Chrome and other Google apps. However, Honor has placed its own software skin atop the operating system to make it feel a bit different from competing Android devices.

The battery sealed into the Honor Note 8 is downright huge at 4,500mAh compared with most other high-end Android devices, which have batteries around 3,000mAh. That means Honor’s smartphone should be capable of lasting a long time on a single charge—assuming its components aren’t hogging too much energy.

There’s no shortage of sensors in the Honor Note 8. The device has a fingerprint sensor for security and an accelerometer and gyroscope to track movement in health apps. Users will also find proximity and compass sensors for all their mapping needs.

The octa-core processor built into the Honor Note 8 should make it a powerful option. According to Huawei, the smartphone will run on the HiSilicon Kirin 955, which features a 2.5GHz quad-core Cortex-A72 chip alongside a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex A53. That’s not necessarily a top-of-the-line processor anymore, but it’ll certainly handle most resource-intensive tasks.

Customers will be able to choose from three internal storage options, ranging from 32GB to 64GB to 128GB. However, the company added that the smartphone will also support a microSD card with up to 256GB of memory. While more internal storage is always nice, the combination of 128GB internal storage and 256GB on a microSD card should be fine for most.

Interestingly, the Honor Note 8 doesn’t appear to come with a near-field communication (NFC) chip inside, meaning it won’t support mobile-payment solutions. It’s unclear why Huawei apparently opted against the NFC chip, since it’s such a prominent feature in most other devices, but don’t expect to use the Note 8 to make mobile payments.

The Honor Note 8’s design is similar to many other Android-based smartphones. The device has a big screen with a small bezel and a front-facing camera above it. On the rear, users will find a camera, flash and the now-ubiquitous fingerprint sensor customers find in so many other smartphones.

In an odd twist, Honor’s Note 8 comes with what can only be called hybrid SIM support. That means that the smartphone comes with support for two nanoSIM cards. However, if a user wants to use a microSD card, he or she will need to remove one of the nanoSIMs and input the microSD. It would’ve been nice to have support for two SIMs and a separate slot for a microSD card.

According to reports out of China, the Honor Note 8 will start shipping on Aug. 9. The entry-level model will cost $345 in China and jump to $420 for the 128GB model. Huawei later asserted to the Engadget blog site that the Honor Note 8 will eventually launch in the U.S., though no pricing or availability has been released as of this writing.