Honor goes upmarket with the launch of the 5.7-inch Honor 8 Pro

Honor today announced the arrival of its latest, and arguably most impressive phone yet: The Honor 8 Pro.

It marks the start of a new line of phones from the trendy startup that’s part of Huawei’s ever growing empire.

Some of you will already be well aware of this phone, as a rebrand of the Honor V9 that went on sale in China earlier this year. It was always pretty likely that it would make an appearance here after a while, and here it is.

Think of it is as cross between the current flagship Honor 8, and the Huawei Mate 9 – with some of the software features from the latest Huawei P10.

Rather than waffle on, let me list the highlights:

A 5.7-inch QHD LCD display, designed for immersive VR experiences – and made possible to enjoy straight away because the Honor 8 Pro box itself converts into a Google Cardboard VR headset.
A 4,000mAh battery. Take note Samsung!
The same Kirin 960 chipset as powering the Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P10, which has a GPU that offers a staggering 180% performance increase over the Kirin 955 used in last year’s flagship Huawei P9.
A 12-megapixel f/2.2 dual-camera, with wide aperture mode, and now offering a standalone monochrome mode like the Leica-branded Huawei models
6GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage and a memory card slot
Available in three colours (blue at launch)
£474.99 retail price

All of that represents a lot of phone for the money, and alongside the Honor 8, a personal favourite of mine, Honor now has something to suit those who found a 5.2-inch screen too small, but perhaps didn’t want to sacrifice performance and functionality for the cheaper Honor 6X that had a 5.5-inch display.

While the Mate 9 and Honor 8 Pro aren’t entirely separated at birth (the Huawei phone having a 5.9-inch screen and a pseudo-stereo sound system in landscape mode), there are still many similarities and, like the Honor 8 vs the Huawei P9, the Honor phone actually offering more functionality in some areas.

Take the Mate 9 with a Full-HD display on all but the more expensive Pro models, whereas Quad-HD is standard here. Likewise, 6GB is standard on the Honor, compared to 4GB.

What the Mate 9 does offer over the Honor 8 Pro is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor coupled to a 12-megapixel colour sensor, but the Honor 8 camera is still a great performer to this day and can hold its own to a lot of the competition.

Read my full review and check out my photo and video gallery.

The Honor 8 Pro supports fast charging (9V/2A), whereas the Huawei models supports even faster ‘super’ charging. The other thing to note is that, for now at least, no UK network will be stocking the phone. The only way to get one is direct from Honor’s online store itself.

The Honor 8 Pro can be pre-ordered from today, initially in blue and later with platinum gold and midnight black options. However, the blue is (in my opinion) the best version anyway!

To help make up your mind, there’s no need to wait for a review as it’s already here (Review will be live at 1130 BST, 4th April 2017)

The Honor 8 Pro should start being delivered to customers around April 20th and those who pre-order can take advantage of the following introductory offers: