HONOR 8 concludes global tour in Paris, launches for Europe

After showcases in China in July and the US earlier this month, HUAWEI concluded the HONOR 8’s global tour at an event in Paris and launched the glass-backed phone for the European market.

At £369.99 in Europe and $399 in the US, the HONOR 8 is priced to creep into the top tier of the smartphone market at a price point that doesn’t force it into side-by-side showdowns with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 or LG G5.

Instead, the HONOR 8 is part of a growing league of flagship assassins meant to steal the hearts of those not set on bagging a $600-700 smartphone. It compares more favorably with ZTE’s Axon 7 and other devices that are just a tad too feature rich for the mid tier of the market.

The 5.2-inch, full HD HONOR 8 is built on a diamond-cut metal frame and encased in glass composed of 15 layers. Between those layers are lithographic, 3D print grating to create prisms within the phone’s glass back.

Beyond its own beauty, the HONOR 8 is more than capable of faithfully rendering the world around it with its 12MP dual-camera setup poking out of its glass back and an 8 MP secondary camera on its face.

The HONOR 8’s primary shooter captures pixels 1.25 microns in size — that’s slightly bigger than the iPhone 6s, but don’t bank on it performing better than the iPhone in low light situations.

It’s “a promising prospect – for its category – when it comes to taking snapshots,” we wrote in our hands-on review of the HONOR 8

Elsewhere in the HONOR 8, there’s an octa-core Kirin CPU that’s backed by an i5 coprocessor and a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. And it’s stocked with 4GB of RAM. It also includes a fingerprint scanner, a Type-C USB port, a 3,000 mAh battery and support for fast charging.

In Europe, the HONOR 8 will only come its 32 GB configuration. Consumers in the US and China have access to both the 32 and 64 GB varieties of the phone.