With the introduction of the budget Gaming segment, the smartphone market faced a lot of heat. There was rather a huge chaos when Huawei launched the honor play in India back in July, if I recall right. Weeks after that, Xiaomi launched the Poco F1 under the new brand name of ‘PocoPhone’. Another huge chaos was created because of its competitive price of 20,999 INR. Many exciting mid-range smartphones are being launched in the H2 of 2018, but, these two still remain the king. Let’s talk about Honor Play here.
Priced at 17,999, at present, the Honor Play is an excellent bang for the buck. It’s typically targeted to a niche category of the smartphone buyers, the budget gamers. With the craze of PUBG on the rise, it was a perfect time for the phone to be released. Let’s first get through the specifications of the phone.
- The Honor Play sports a gorgeous 6.3 inch 1080p LTPS IPS LCD Panel with 60 Hz refresh rate and a medium sized notched design featuring rounded corners. It comes with the new 19.5:9 aspect ratio with a pixel count of 2340*1080.
- The Honor Play packs the extremely powerful Hi-Silicon Kirin 970 which is Huawei’s in-house flagship Processor built in TSMC’s almost new 10nm process. The Processor, in terms of CPU and GPU benchmarks sits somewhere between the Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 845 and is quite equivalent to Samsung’s Exynos 9810. It has a ARM Mali-G72 MP12 GPU and a dedicated NPU for AI tasks. It comes with 64 GB storage and 4GB and 6GB RAM variants.
- The Honor Play is backed-up by a 3750 mAh non-removable battery Which supports 18 W fast charging and comes with a bundled fast charger in the box. It takes about 1.5 hrs to fully charge the device.
- The Honor Play sports a dual camera setup with 16MP(Wide-angle)+2MP(Monochrome) sensors with f/2.2 and f/2.4 apertures respectively and AI enhancements (at least that’s what Huawei likes to call it) on the back. It features a 16 MP front shooter with f/2.0 aperture and is capable of Portrait shots.
- It has a USB 2.0 Type-C 1.0 reversible connector port and a 3.5 mm Headphone Jack (Fortunately) with a dedicated DAC for excellent 3D output and all the sensors you would expect from a flagship smartphone expect the NFC sensor.
- The Display is protected by Huawei’s own patented 12-layer scratch resistant glass and is in fact, quite durable. The smartphone comes with a bundled case.
- The smartphone features dual-band Wi-Fi a/g/b/n/ac. Bluetooth 4.2 with A2DP profile and Qualcomm aptX and aptX HD codec support for wireless stereo lossless audio. It has a Dual-sim Hybrid Slot and Dual 4G VoLTE.
- The smartphone comes with Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box and project treble support and runs on a custom skin named EMUI. Latest EMUI version on the Honor Play is 8.2.0.151 with EMUI 9 based on Android 9.0 Pie coming very soon. The Custom skin is loaded with AI enhancements. The UI is quite functional and snappy when it comes to practical performance.
Let’s now come to the Review part. Let’s Divide it between the Pros and the Cons.
PROS
Display
The display is absolutely a gorgeous one. The 1080p panel just brings out colors to life. You will notice it the first time you boot up the phone. Of course it’s not like the ones in the Samsung or LG flagships but you can compare it with the One-Plus 6. It’s one of the best in its price range. The viewing angles are above-average but I won’t say it’s the best. The blacks are decent and the whites are amazing. The nominal contrast level is 1300:1 and the screen can go up to 470 nits in its default settings. You can also set the screen temperature according to your liking.
Performance
This is the USP of the Device. The processor which powers the Honor Play is an extremely powerful one. It’s the same processor used in the Huawei P20 pro which costs almost thrice its price. I’m not too sure why Honor decided to put it in this mid-range device. They almost killed their other affordable flagships with its launch. The performance is truly flagship level and the UI experience is fine. Though it runs on a custom skin it is quite bug-free, though there are cons to it which we would mention in the later part of the blog. Now, let’s come to the specialty of the device, gaming. Though the device is touted as a gaming centric smartphone, it’s rather an affordable flagship. The gaming on the phone is excellent, but there is a con too. We would mention that later. PUBG runs very fine at HDR graphics and ultra-frame rate, on par with the mighty One Plus 6, thanks to GPU Turbo. I have heard many reviewers doubt the implementation a marketing gimmick, nut trust me it rather works. The gaming is pretty stable and is on par with the one plus 6 where the GPU is far more superior. Asphalt 9 runs on the highest settings with extreme smoothness. Modern Combat 5 runs amazingly. N.O.V.A. 3 runs smoothly. Mobile Legends runs fine. It handles every game that it thrown to it. The UI is also quite snappy and the gaming mode helps, especially during PUBG gameplay where you can’t really afford mistakes. There are no noticeable UI lags though you might notice a few lags. The RAM management also has been done pretty good. Overall, the performance is amazing at the price point.
BATTERY LIFE, WELL-LIT PHOTOGRAPHY, 3.5mm Headphone Jack, Build Quality, Face Unlock
Let’s now talk about all the other PROS of the device. First let’s talk about the build quality of the device. The build quality of the device is amazing. Both the looks and the in hand feel is amazing. It has a metal back with zero plastic used in the construction and it feels that way, like a tank. You feel like holding a block of pretty slim metal. The matte blue finish really looks amazing.
Now, let’s talk about unlocking the phone. There is a blazing fast fingerprint scanner in the rear side of the phone and the face unlocking too, is quite fast and secure. It can’t be fooled easily. The face also works at night in pitch darkness but you need to bear the full brightness of the screen for one and a half odd seconds or so. The output via the 3.5 mm jack is amazing. It really suited for what it is , the budget section. Many of the previous phones half great audio quality, but only when they are connected to a very heavy headphone. That is not the case with the Play. It can drive budget earphones extremely well and that’s what feels great. I don’t think there a many would use the Audio Technica M50x with the honor play. Rather they would us a SONY XB450AP or a JBL T290 and it thus serves the purpose it is meant to.
The battery of the device is also pretty amazing and the device can last you for a typical working day for a heavy user. You get about 6 hrs. of screen on time which is quite great. It is really good to see a smartphone with such good battery life without being too aggressive on the RAM management.
The phone comes with a set of pretty good cameras. The 16+2 MP Rear cameras are amazing for the price point and the front shooter is also decent. The daylight shots and close up shots come out to be pretty good. The Portrait mode is also decent. The smartphone comes with a plethora of pre-loaded camera modes which also is quite amazing. The front camera is also quite good in its class. (in daylight specifically. The AI based scene detection is very accurate indeed. If you love taking the photos of food and stuff in fancy restaurants, then this phone is definitely for you. The AI mode comes quite handy at times. I shall talk more about the camera in the cons section. Here are some sample shots taken with the honor play.
CONS
- The speaker output of the device is not up to the mark. Don’t get me wrong. During calls on Hands-free, the speaker volume is adequate. It’s not like you can’t hear the sound or you can’t hear the ringtones on the device, but the speaker volume is definitely low considering the price point of the device. I genuinely feel the speaker volume should be higher while consuming multimedia.
- There is some sort of fast-charging issue on the device. This is majorly a software bug and will be solved with the EMUI 9 update on the device which will strike the users pretty soon. The device charges very rapidly which is actually a very good thing. But the device stops charging rapidly after about 45 mins and u have to re-plug or reconnect the charger to resume quick charging. This is basically similar to apple’s charge-gate issue in their latest iPhones which they later fixed with the software update.
- The camera of the device really struggles in low-lighting conditions. The phone performs surprisingly good in extremely low-lit conditions, thanks to its night. But in moderate dim-lighting, both the front and the rear cameras struggle a lot. This is due to the small aperture of the device. I frankly feel they should have gone with at least a f/1.9 aperture for their lens. And, please don’t switch on the AI mode for low-light shots. Rather switch on the Night mode and it will help significantly.
- Another con that I feel with the device is the home launcher layout. I frankly fell they should have even more customization option. At the least of all, adjusting the size of the icons is a mandatory setting. Overall the UI is quite snappy and functional. I have problems with the kinds of icons and launcher used but this might not be a major con for the users.
- The phone gets pretty warm during gaming but the good thing is that it does not overheat. U can game uninterrupted.
- You can’t really expect very fast software updates like one plus or Nokia devices but definite honor play receives update faster than Samsung LG and even some of the ASUS devices. So, the update situation is not bad but not also among the best. This is actually because they are on this custom skin called EMUI which is a very heavy customization of the Vanilla Android. Guys, I would love to make a point here that the stable Pie Update has already hit the global and Chinese variant of the Honor Play and the Indian variant will receive it within the first week of December.Honor is among the quickest to give pie updates to their devices who are on a custom skin.
So guys this was all about the device. Overall I feel that it is an amazing device in its price point, an all-round player with a few shortcomings which I feel most users can deal with. I recently noticed that the price of Honor Play has dropped considerably to 16,999 INR on the Amazon website which I feel makes this the best buy in its price range. The extra 4,000 INR is frankly not worth for the POCO F1 in my frank opinion.