Honor Play design
Contents
The most important feature of Honor Play is its metal unibody which is similar to the Honor View 10 launched last year. In Honor 10, Huawei P20 Lite and Huawei P20 Pro, the company has used glass back panel. But in the latest phone, an attempt has been made to do something different. If we talk about stability and strength, then glass body cannot compete with metal. Honor Play is less sleek than Honor 10, but it does not feel as premium. Due to the large display and thin body, the smartphone does not fit easily in the hands.
When you look at the Honor Play, you will feel that the design has the influence of Honor 10, there are very thin borders on the sides of the screen. The notch of Honor Play is slightly bigger. The bottom part of the phone is quite small, but the Honor logo has got a place. It is a bit difficult to hold the Honor Play easily in the hand, but despite having a 6.3-inch display, the phone is very compact. Honor Play will be available in India in Navy Blue and Midnight Black colors.
Due to the very thin bezel and edge-to-edge design, the fingerprint sensor in Honor Play is placed on the back panel. The phone is quite long, so your fingers may have a little problem reaching the fingerprint sensor. If the user holds the phone properly in his hand, he will be able to use the fingerprint sensor easily. On the right side of the phone, you will find the power button and the volume up and down button. On the left side of the phone, a hybrid dual-SIM tray is provided. If you want, you can insert two nano SIMs or one nano SIM and one microSD card. Honor Play has 64 GB of inbuilt storage, which you can increase up to 256 GB with the help of a card.
There is a 3.5mm headphone jack along with a USB-Type C port at the bottom of the phone. Apart from this, there is a loudspeaker which may disappoint you a bit. We tested the speaker while playing audio files, YouTube videos and games and found that the sound is poor at full volume. The thickness of the phone is 7.5mm and its weight is 176 grams. The build quality of Honor Play is average.
Honor Play Specifications and Display
Honor Play is equipped with the company’s own flagship processor HiSilicon Kirin 970. Let us tell you that this chipset has also been used in Honor 10, Honor View 10 and Huawei P20 Pro. It is expected that the company will introduce the Kirin 980 processor at IFA 2018. For artificial intelligence processing, the Kirin 970 chipset is equipped with Neural Processing Unit (NPU). It improves camera performance, battery life and app optimization. GPU Turbo is present in Honor Play for gaming optimization. It is claimed that it gives 60 percent better performance and 30 percent better battery life while playing games. Honor Play will be available in two RAM variants – 4 GB and 6 GB. A 3750 mAh battery has been provided for power backup. Honor Play has 64 GB UFS 2.1 storage. In terms of connectivity, the phone has 4G VoLTE, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth version 4.2 LE, GPS / A-GPS, GLONASS and USB Type-C support. Accelerometer, ambient light sensor, gyroscope and proximity sensor are part of the phone. The dual SIM Honor Play supports 4G network.
The smartphone has a 6.3-inch Full HD + IPS LCD display. Its resolution is 1080×2340 pixels, whose aspect ratio is 19.5: 9. The phone works on an octa-core Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset which is supported by Mali-G72 GPU. To control battery consumption, you can set Full HD + and HD + resolution in Honor Play yourself. For this, you have to go to the battery section of the settings and set the screen resolution. The viewing angles of the Honor Play display are excellent. While reviewing the phone, we did not face any problem after setting the Honor Play to Full HD + resolution. The screen seemed very reflective when using Honor Play outside in sunlight. Some third party apps are not optimized for the display notch. While running video apps such as YouTube, the display zooms out and a black bar appears.
Honor Play performance, software and battery life
There is no doubt about the performance of the Kirin 970 processor, it is a great chipset. The 6GB RAM variant of Honor Play did not slow down or stutter at all while playing PUBG, Asphalt 8, 4G connectivity and social media multitasking. Honor has given a new antenna design in this smartphone which claims to give better call quality. The calling experience was excellent even in poor connectivity. While reviewing the Honor Play, we did not have any complaints about the earpiece. In the benchmark test, Honor Play went far ahead of smartphones like Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo F7 and Vivo V9 in this price range.
Gaming experience is the biggest feature of Honor Play. In China, the company has marketed this handset as a gaming phone. We have tested the GPU Turbo technology of the phone by playing PUBG and Mobile Legends. After playing a few online matches of PUBG, we saw that the performance of the phone was quite good. GPU Turbo was on while playing the game, so it is difficult to say what the experience would have been without this technology. The phone gets a little warm after 25-30 minutes of continuous gaming. The battery was getting consumed rapidly while playing the game, however, there is nothing surprising in this considering the requirements of the game.
We also tried playing the latest Asphalt 9: Legends game on the Honor Play and the results were pretty good. The company told us that ‘4D Gaming’ will be added to the Honor Play in an upcoming OTA update. The Honor Play runs on EMUI 8.2, which is based on Android 8.1. We believe that EMUI has improved a lot in the last few years and it is now ready to compete with Xiaomi’s MIUI. It also has some useful features like one-handed mode, navigation gestures, theme catalog and WiFi+ (it is able to switch between WiFi and mobile networks seamlessly).
Many unwanted apps are still present. You will find games like Asphalt Nitro and Sonic Master pre-installed in Honor Play. Apps like Mirror, Compass, Phone Clone, Translator and Quick are also present in the phone. We did not find some of these apps useful. There have been some changes in the UI such as Android Messages has become the default messaging app and Google Chrome the default browser in Honor Play. Honor Play supports face recognition with its 16-megapixel selfie camera. We found the face unlock feature to be quite accurate. However, it does not work in low light. It easily detects the face when the brightness of the display is increased at night. We also did not face any problem while using the fingerprint sensor.
Honor Play has a 3,750 mAh battery. The battery lasts for a day on 30 minutes of gaming, full day calling, quick email check and social media browsing. In the HD video battery test, we found that the battery gives a backup of 10 hours 45 minutes. The phone has fast charging support, the charger provided with the phone takes about 2 hours to charge from 0 to 100 percent.
Honor Play Camera
Honor Play will have a vertical dual rear camera setup. It has a 16-megapixel primary sensor with an aperture of f/2.2 and a 2-megapixel secondary sensor with an aperture of f/2.4. The rear camera comes with LED flash. The front camera is 16 megapixels with an f/2.0 aperture. To compete with the cameras of Asus and Xiaomi smartphones available at this price, the company needs to work on both its cameras.
Like the Honor 10, the Honor Play also comes with artificial intelligence capture modes. This technology sometimes works well and sometimes not. Photos taken in low light have a good color balance, while when there was enough light, the photo taken appeared overexposed. The good thing about Honor smartphones is that you can disable artificial intelligence enhancement even after taking a picture. This gives you the freedom to choose between two versions of each shot. When the phone’s camera is pointed in the direction of a person, the neural processing unit (NPU) automatically activates portrait mode. Apart from this, we did not see any use of artificial intelligence processing in the camera app. In the camera app, you will get manual aperture, portrait mode, photo, video and AR lens feature. Apart from this, you will also get slow-motion recording, night mode, time lapse mode, 3D panorama and many other features.
The front and rear camera sensors support real-time bokeh effect. The portrait mode in the front camera works erratically. It was not able to detect faces properly while taking pictures indoors. It started working fine when we took the phone towards the light. Selfie shots in daylight are quite sharp but pictures taken in low-light may disappoint you. The rear dual camera setup is capable of 4K and the front camera is capable of full HD+ (2280×1080) video recording. Honor Play supports electronic image stabilization. Still, the video quality is not very good.
Our verdict
Honor Play is an affordable smartphone that comes with Kirin 970 chipset, in a way it is a value for money handset. The design of Honor Play is quite sleek and it looks very good. However, due to the size and average camera quality, some people may not want to buy this handset. Honor Play has been launched with GPU Turbo.
Honor Play comes with GPU Turbo. It is expected that in the coming time Honor 9 Lite, Honor 7X, Honor 10 and Honor View 10 smartphones will also be equipped with GPU Turbo via OTA update.
In terms of performance, Honor Play is positioned below Honor 10. The attractive price goes in favor of this phone. It seems to be a strong contender in the budget of Rs 20,000-25,000. Unfortunately, as promised by the company, it is not available in open sale.
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