The Huawei Honor 8 was officially announced for the Indian markets yesterday with a fairly attractive hardware specs sheet. However, the Indian market is crowded with multiple mid-ranged powerful handsets that are priced similarly, so it certainly won’t be a walk in the park for Huawei’s newest offering. So what does the competition look like?
The OnePlus 3 is one of the best smartphones you can get in the sub Rs 30,000 price range. The phone has been available for quite some time now, which means it has had the time to feel the market and connect with potential customers accordingly. Let’s compare the hardware on board the two devices to see how they fare, at least on paper.
Key features
The highlight of the Honor 8 is the dual-camera setup on the back and a fairly attractive metal unibody design, which is the norm in the mobile industry today.
The OnePlus 3 also features an appealing external hardware, but there’s barely anything in terms of additional features. However, the fact that it has a larger display might be a crucial feature for many.
Display
The OnePlus 3 is sporting a 5.5-inch Full HD Optic AMOLED (1920x1080) display on board, which will shine bright even if you’re using the device in broad daylight. The Honor 8 has a smaller 5.2-inch display panel (LCD), but with the same resolution. This basically means that it will have a higher pixel density, although it will be barely discernible to the human eye.
Camera
The Honor 8 comes with two 12MP cameras on the back. Huawei is using f/2.2 sensors here, though, which might put it at a disadvantage. But thanks to the wide range of software tweaks made by the company, we expect performance to be on par with the big guns out there. There’s an 8MP front camera (f/2.4) on the handset.
The OnePlus 3 is packing a 16MP rear camera with optical image stabilization, which is bound to perform better compared to the Honor 8. The front is equipped with an 8MP (f/2.0) camera.
Performance
The OnePlus 3 is packing Qualcomm’s fancy Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor, which is the best in the business right now. Performance will be butter smooth here, so one can’t ask for much in this area. Huawei’s offering comes with the home-grown Kirin 950 octa-core processor, which is seen on some high-end Huawei offerings. We’re yet to get a proper comparison of the two chipsets, so it’s hard to jump to a conclusion at this point.
Battery
Both phones are equipped with 3,000mAh batteries, which means the performance should be on par, at least on paper. But if were to pick a winner here, the Huawei Honor 8 will have to be it. Mainly because the Snapdragon 820 chipset is known for consuming too much power, although not nearly as much as the Snapdragon 810, which was a battery hog.
Other features
The Huawei Honor 8 comes with 32GB of internal storage plus a microSD card slot, while OnePlus 3 buyers will have to make do with 64GB of onboard storage. Both handsets come with a USB Type-C port, though, which is a major plus.
The OnePlus 3 is equipped with a hefty 6GB of RAM, while the Honor 8 is equipped with only 4GB of RAM. I use the word only merely for the sake of comparison, but it’s plenty for any device.
Both phones are running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow by default, with their own customized UI skins on top (OxygenOS for the OnePlus 3 and Emotion UI for the Honor 8). The OnePlus 3 has a front facing fingerprint scanner while Huawei has opted for a rear facing fingerprint sensor.
Pricing and availability
The Huawei Honor 8 is available for purchase right away from multiple e-commerce retailers including Amazon and Flipkart . With an asking price of Rs 29,999, the Honor 8 won’t go easy on your wallets.
The OnePlus 3 can be purchased for Rs 27,999 via Amazon India. Unfortunately, the handset is an exclusive via the retailer in the country, although you can get it without any pre-registrations or flash sales.
