Honor 8 pre-orders in the US begin August 17 with a free $50 gift card

Remember the Galaxy Note 7? From that Korean company? Well, wash your mind from that and just look at this jewel of a phone that will bring your “eyes to the world.” It also brings Huawei and its affiliate, Honor, back to the US for another product launch.

The Honor 8 was launched from an event in San Francisco and with a move in markets from China — where it sold 280,000 units in the first four hours of sales — to the US, the smartphone is definitely getting targeted toward the Samsung crowd.

The company reminded us of how hip and young it is, — Honor’s Global President George Zhao said that he likes to be near young people and feel young in doing so — showing off its involvement at cultural events like SXSW and its own Honor Planet music festival in Shenzhen and the Honor Film Festival in New York.

Honor believes that smartphones are just too darn for the millennial crowd and that with more options hedging down the price ladder, it wants to put the bite in the budget sector. That’s where the Honor 5X came in at CES this year and that’s where the Honor 8 takes the baton.

As a reminder, we’re dealing with a 5.2-inch full HD display under tapered, color-filtered 2.5D glass. It has a Kirin 950 processor, just a step behind the Huawei P9’s 955 — made out of four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 cores in a BIG.little configuration.

There is parity with the P9 in terms of the rear cameras: two 12-megapixel units. Both of them are Sony IMX286 with a 1.25μm pixel size. One sensor does color duty while the other is set for monochrome pictures, just as in the P9. Brightness and color information from both cameras get merged into a single product. There’s laser-assisted contrast focusing, too. And the housing of the module doesn’t poke out of the back.

There’s also a single 8-megapixel selfie shooter with 1.4μm pixels and a back-mounted fingerprint sensor that doubles as a “Smart Key” for multi-configuration instant app access. Don’t forget about microSD expansion, Android Marshmallow, USB-C, NFC, IR blaster for an IoT remote, VoLTE with Band 12 support and a 3,000mAh battery. A half-hour on fast charging can bring that battery up to 47 percent. A full charge may last “even heavy users” up to 1.2 days.

Down to brass tax: the GSM-compatible Honor 8 (that’s AT&T and T-Mobile to you) comes in Midnight Black, Pearl White and Sapphire Blue. There’s 4GB of RAM, standard, but two native storage options: 32GB and 64GB. The former variant will cost $399.99 while the latter will go for $449.99.

Pre-orders are on August 17 at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, Newegg and HiHonor.com with a $50 gift card for customers who jump on before September 3.

Source: Honor