Honor 8C first impressions: Another great design, but camera is cause for concern

Nandini YadavNov 24, 2018 09:46:23 IST

Honor India will be officially launching the Honor 8C in India on 29 November. However, at a closed-door briefing on 20 November, the company handed me the Honor 8C phone, and since I've had a couple of days to play around with the phone, here are my first impressions of the device.

Honor 8C. Image: tech2/Nandini Yadav

Build, design and display

The Honor 8C features a 6.26-inch LCD display with a resolution of 720p (HD+, since it has a notch). The phone sports a plastic body but it doesn’t feel cheap. The body is smoothly curved towards the display, which makes it very comfortable to grip on to. The colour of the device is pretty striking too. The one I got was the blue variant, which has darker shades along the sides and lighter blue in the middle, and when you tilt the device to one side, you can see vertical glow-lines, which gives it a glassy look.

Chipset, storage and OS

The Honor 8C is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 chip, which is accompanied by 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of onboard storage. There is another variant of the device, which comes with 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage. Both the variants can further be expanded up to 512 GB.

The Honor 8C runs Android 8.1 Oreo, which is layered with Huawei’s custom EMUI 8.2. The new OS comes with features like dual-Bluetooth connection, an option to hide the notch, a simple mode (which removed all the bloat from the UI) and a DND mode in game suite (that keeps calls from interrupting your gaming session).

Honor 8C doesn't look like much from the front. Image: tech2/Nandini Yadav

Camera and Battery

And here are the two highlights of the phone put together — the 4,000 mAh battery, and the phone's cameras. In the couple of days that I've been using this phone, the former has proven to be a delight. The latter, not so much. Of course. the final verdict will only come with the review.

The Honor 8C sports a 13 MP + 2 MP setup at the back and a single 8 MP sensor up front. Both the selfie and rear cam are accompanied by an LED flash. The one on the front comes with what Honor calls “soft flash”, which essentially lets you adjust the brightness to three levels.

I've only shot a handful of pics with the phone, but the quality of the images already has me worried. The camera takes a while to focus on the subject and sometimes the focus isn't very clear in the final images. I didn't find low light images to be very great either. For some reason, the camera appears to be artificially brightening the centre in this scenario. Colours, overall, are also rather dull.

I will of course be playing around with the settings and AI modes to see if there's any improvement.

Honor 8C sports a 13 MP + 2 MP dual-camera setup at the rear. Image: tech2/Nandini Yadav

Conclusion

We are yet to know about the pricing of the device, however, the chipset and camera setup places it in competition with the likes of Realme 2 and the Redmi Note 6 Pro. Whether the 8C will trump its competition remains to be seen.

Stay tuned for the review, which is coming next week.