HONOR X8a Review: Affordable DSLR-like smartphone
I enjoy taking pictures. It’s one of those things I love because looking back at my shots reminds me of that one moment-turned-memory. This is why one of the things I look for in a phone is its camera quality. I wasn’t expecting that a phone as affordable as ₱10,990 would offer a 100MP ultra-clear camera. My huge kudos goes to HONOR PH for bringing HONOR X8a, a budget-friendly DSLR-like smartphone to the Philippine market.
Read our first impressions of HONOR X8a here.
Display and Processor
HONOR X8a doesn’t come with a home button. With a 6.7-inch LCD display and a 93.6% screen-to-body ratio, it appears almost edgeless. It has a 2388 x 1080 resolution, a TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light Certification, and it can display 16.7 million colors. This means that it reduces harmful blue light to protect the vision of users. You can adjust its refresh rate from 60Hz to 90Hz.
Multimedia Experience
To test HONOR X8a’s specs, I played Sky: Children of Light for more than an hour. It can play at max 30fps but you can lower the settings if you wish to save battery. For a few minutes, my gameplay is smooth but I experienced frame drops and lags once in a while. It also took more than 20 minutes before the phone starts to heat. The display also appears quite blurry and pixelated. When it comes to music and sound quality, the speakers are loud enough.
Other than that, with MediaTek Helio G88, Sky: Children of Light and other demanding games are still playable if you lower your expectations. Moreover, HONOR X8a is equipped with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.
Camera Quality
We already covered its camera quality in a separate article about our first impression. To see more about its photography capabilities, there’s a section about it here.
As I keep on mentioning, HONOR X8a has good camera quality, especially for its price point. The only cons I noticed are that it doesn’t take good photos when zoomed in and in low-light settings. Here are some photo samples:
Functionality and Battery
Powered by a 4500mAh battery and a 22.5W Wired HONOR SuperCharge, HONOR X8a boasts that it can last an entire day. I proved that this is true when I used it almost the entire day a few days ago. I brought two phones with me: my main phone and HONOR X8a. Even though I was using the latter more to use the apps and take pictures, it still lasted longer.
It connects on a 2.4G or 5G wifi, with a USB Type-C charging port. You can also have up to 2 nano-SIMs connected.
HONOR X8a Price and Availability
For a phone with a 100MP camera as its main feature, the price is affordable at ₱10,990! You can do a lot of things with it too and it’s good for its price range.
You can pre-order it until March 24 at Lazada, Shopee, and TikTok shops to avail the free HONOR earbuds worth ₱1,590. HONOR stores across the Philippine stores will also have it available soon.
