Huawei Honor 8 price: New flagship comes across as modest P9

Huawei website

Huawei has just officially announced the new Honor 8 mid-range iteration. While being a new device under the Honor series, first impressions suggest that the Honor 8 may have gotten some ideas from the P9 flagship instead.

The Honor series is a sub-brand of Huawei, although the top-tier of the flagships in the lineup is still lacking compared to other Huawei flagships like the Mate and P series. However, the Honor 8 blurs the line between the flagship series. One improvement that Huawei brought to the Honor 8 is the dual-cam setup, first seen on the Huawei P9. However, it lacks the Leica cam for its main setup, although it retains some of the same features like a 12MP assembly and laser autofocus.

Meanwhile, Huawei also tweaked some improvements for the Honor 8, with some specs and features different from previous iterations in the Honor series. While it remains having the same, all-metal chassis reminiscent of the Honor 5X, it has a more compact profile, since the Honor 8 only features a 5.2-inch screen with 1080p resolution against the 5X's 5.5-inch display.

Under the hood, the new Honor 8 is powered by the previous-gen Kirin 950 chipset with 3GB of RAM. Meanwhile, there are two versions for onboard storage, and both the 32GB and 64GB variants are expandable via microSD support. Other features and specs include a fingerprint scanner, 3,000 mAh battery, and Android 6.0 Marshmallow right out of the box.

Since Huawei has branded the Honor series for the global market, it is already expected that the Honor 8 will also come out of China. One of the confirmed regions for the global release is the U.S., where the Honor 8 is expected to release next month, with the launch event taking place on Aug. 16 in San Francisco.