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Battery life and camera

Battery life

Massive 4,000mAh battery
Slightly better than average battery life

One of the main benefits of a plus-size phone is all the extra space available to squeeze a massive battery in. On that front, the Honor 8 Pro’s got more junk in its trunk than the whole Kardashian clan combined. A massive 4,000mAh battery to be precise. As some will tell you, though, size isn’t everything.

Despite its massive capacity, the 8 Pro’s battery life is pretty average. OK, yes, you’ll comfortably get a full day’s use out of the phone while hammering the features, but not much more.

You’re not going to be able to eke a couple of days heavy use out of the thing without your battery circling the drain before you get home. We regularly had 20% left come evening after having spent the day hammering social media, emails, web browsing and some commute-busting gaming.

Honor’s claims of two day’s regular use on a single charge are a little bit embellished, so unless you’re happy to take things lighter on the usage front, nightly charges are still going to be a must. That or keeping a spare charger to hand at work.

It’s not the speediest to charge either. It took the phone 30 minutes to restore just 20% of its power supply.

What’s more, during our standard battery test, playing a 90 minute full HD video on full brightness, the Honor 8 Pro haemorrhaged 25% of its battery. This is a huge figure compared with the competition. By contrast the OnePlus 3T lost just 14% of its power.

Camera

Dual 12MP cameras on the rear
Reasonably wide f/2.2 aperture
Solid 8MP selfie camera

Like many other aspects of the phone, the Honor 8 Pro’s cameras are solid but won’t ever set the world alight. The dual 12MP rear mounted cameras are enhanced by a dual-LED dual tone flash, laser autofocus and phase detection, while the 8MP front-facing snapper features its own wide aperture f/2.0 for improved low light shooting.

Sometimes it’s as much about what’s missing as what’s there, however, and that’s the case here. Although the Honor 8 Pro’s cameras have plenty going for them, optical image stabilisation is sadly noticeable by its omission.

Fortunately, the focus is quick and sharp and the general image capture process reasonably prompt. You will need a steady hand to avoid blurry images and the need for constant reshoots though.

Honor’s dual camera setup takes a different approach to some of the competition. While Apple uses its second lens to take you closer to the action and LG to give you a wider field of view, Honor uses its additional lens to enhance the tones of a shot with a dedicated monochrome sensor.

The result is photos with pleasing levels of depth and natural, subtle colours. Merging images from the two sensors, the monochrome shot helps lighten standard images, bringing a more natural, true to life collection of colours and tones.

With HDR mode kicking in, there’s a pleasing balance between areas of light and dark. With a bit of cloud, skies look deep and moody. There’s not much pop to images, but a decent balance.

Low light shots are solid without being exceptional. The cameras let in a decent amount of light, letting you pick out levels to the shot, not just solid blocks of light and dark. Images are quite noisy though, with skies and areas of subtle shading regularly being diminished by excessive graining.

Around front, the 8MP selfie snapper is similarly solid. The wide f/2.0 lens lets in plenty of light, but snaps are, like on so many phones, quite flat and lacking in definition.