Honor X8D Review

The HONOR X8d is the latest addition to the growing HONOR budget smartphone lineup, just months after the release of the X8c and X9d. Priced at PHP 15,999, the HONOR X8d aims to be a budget-friendly yet AI-capable midrange smartphone. Let’s see how the HONOR x8d stacks up with its performance and AI capabilities.

Unboxing and First Impressions

You have the typical HONOR packaging design on the HONOR X8d. Like most smartphone, the back of the phone is showcased on the front box with the RAM and storage configuration listed at the bottom part.

The packaging contents are as follows

• HONOR X8d Smartphone
• QuickStart Guide and Warranty Sheet
• Silicone Case
• 45W Charger
• USB Type-C to C Cable

The HONOR X8d features a 6.77-inch HONOR Full View Display with a resolution of 2392x1080p with a 120Hz refresh rate. The AMOLED display supports up to 3000 nits of brightness as well as 3840Hz PWM Dimming. The 3000 nits of brightness make it bright enough to be usable in highly lit environments and help combat reflections. Like most HONOR smartphones, one of the HONOR X8d’s key selling points is durability. The display has an SGS Premium Performance Certification of Drop & Crush Resistance.

Powering the incredible mid-range display is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s 4G Gen 2 chipset that sports an Adreno 610 GPU. HONOR’s marketing material shows a “16(8+8) memory configuration which actually means that it only has 8GB of physical RAM while the additional “8GB” is taken from the storage to act as a cache – similar to a PC’s pagefile functionality.

The HONOR X8d comes in an 8GB/128GB, 8GB/256GB, and 8GB/512GB RAM and Storage configuration. The HONOR X8d also comes in Light Blue, Velvet Black, and Velvet Gray colorways.

Our specific review unit is the Light Blue variant with 8GB/512GB of storage. This specific configuration is priced at Php 15,999.

Moving to the sides, the right side houses your volume buttons as well as the lock button. The lock button also acts as the phone’s fingerprint reader – a nostalgic throwback to the previous generation of smartphones. That said, the fingerprint reader can store up to 5 fingerprints, which is one fingerprint more than the four fingerprints you’d find on most Android smartphones.

The left side houses the AI button, which can be configured depending on how you’d like to utilize the HONOR X8d’s AI features. Do note that some of these features are tied to Google Gemini’s functionality. The AI button isn’t a revolutionary feature, but it’s indeed considered are nowadays as this alongside the fingerprint reader button are smartphone features that used to be common more than 5 years back.

The AI button is recessed enough and has a different actuation point for it to be resistant to accidental presses. I find it to be positioned perfectly accessible in one-handed operations, regardless of whether I’m using it left-handed or right-handed.

HOONOR X8d Camera

The camera setup on the HONOR X8d follows the common smartphone trend of ditching an additional albeit useless macro camera for it the marketing purposes of calling it a triple-camera smartphone. Instead, you have a 108MP f/1.75 Main Camera and a 5MP f/2.2 Wide Camera. To mimic a triple-camera design, the flash is enclosed in a housing similar to the camera lenses.

We commend HONOR for not just cramping in a high megapixel sensor just for the flex. The 108MP Main Camera takes decent quality photos that’s ample for social media. The 2x and 3X zoom takes advantage of sensor cropping that doesn’t tarnish the quality that much considering its price.

Moreover, HONOR’s camera system is backed by its Magic Retouch AI features to further enhance your photos or salvage unusable ones through the power of AI. What I find most useful among these features is the AI upscale as the low-resolution cropped images become usable, especially in pictures that have text.

Here are the rest of the HONOR Magic Retouch photography features:

• Remove Reflection
• AI Eraser
• Erase Passers-by
• AI Upscale
• AI Outpainting
• AI Cutout
• Face Tune-Eyes OpenCleanup Suggestion

The selfie camera is a 16MP f/2.45 lens that’s passable for a Php 15,999 camera. I’d say it’s not the worst selfie camera that we’ve seen on a budget smartphone

As mentioned earlier, durability remains to be a key aspect of HONOR smartphones, the X8d included as it sports a whopping 7,000mAh Li-ion Polymer battery with 45W HONOR SuperCharge support. Its battery is enough to survive a full two-day period, even with an always-on mobile data and relatively high brightness. That said, the large 7,000mAh capacity may feel like the 45W HONOR Supercharge feels slow, as the larger capacity would mean a longer charging period.

While you have a sturdy battery, the HONOR X8d itself is sturdy with its IP65 water and dust resistance rating.

Conclusion

HONOR continues to master its formula of having a rigid smartphone at its core. But this time around, HONOR decided to play more with the HONOR X8d by integrating more software related features rather than key spec improvements. It offers a well-rounded spec that you would typically see on a budget to midrange level smartphone, pair that with HONOR’s signature durability and now, a plethora of AI features and you have a midrange phone that stands out in a very much diluted space.

Whether these features particularly the AI centric ones are justifiable enough to make a purchase is up to you and how often you’d use these features. At Php 16,999 it starts to breach more spec-heavy phones and the trade off between specs and durability becomes clearer. So, if you value a durable smartphone that can do almost every basic task with ease yet offers quality of life “AI” features and will likely use these feature-set in a daily basis then the HONOR X8d is an option you should consider for a smartphone under Php 20,000.