Honor Play (4 GB)

Huawei is flooding the Indian smartphone market with lots of budget and mid-range phones and the latest from them is the new Honor Play, a phone with their flagship processor, specially launched for the gamers. It comes in a bezel-less metal unibody design and looks good. With curved edges, it feels good and comfortable in hands, the build quality is premium. With just 7.48 mm of thickness, the Honor Play is quite slim. It sports a 6.3 inches FullView Full HD+ display with a notch on top and thus having the tall 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The display quality is good for its price and has good colors.

The biggest highlight of the phone is its great performance, which is made possible by the 2.36 GHz Octa Core Huawei Hisilicon Kirin 970 processor with a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit, which independently handles AI related tasks), which is Huawei’s top-end processor and is used in all their flagship phones this year. It comes paired with 4 GB or 6 GB RAM and Mali-G72 MP12 GPU. Huawei has added ‘GPU Turbo’ to the Honor Play, which makes the graphics processor efficient and saves the battery life. The performance on the Honor Play is just great, it is the flagship-level performance by all means and you can compare it with all the much higher priced top-end phones out there in the world.

Throw anything at it, be it very heavy multitasking or the heaviest of the games, it can handle everything smoothly. Gaming on the Honor Play is just excellent, the gameplay is smooth, the battery drain and temperatures are in control. To enhance the gaming experience, there is ‘4D Gaming Experience with Smart Shock’, which uses AI to detect image and sound and gives you an intelligent game vibration, although it is available for only a few games like PUBG. It also comes with 3D Gaming Sound which delivers superior sound output over the headphones. It is undoubtedly the best phone for gamers under Rs. 20000.

Coming to the cameras, the Honor Play comes with a 16 MP + 2 MP dual camera setup on the back, and has very good picture quality with good details although it tends to overexpose at high dynamic ranges. Huawei touts a lot about its ‘AI Cameras’, but to be honest, it doesn’t work very well and oversaturates the pictures, so you are better with the AI mode turned off.  There is a 16 MP selfie camera on the front which again is an excellent shooter. Huawei’s camera app is very powerful and feature-rich, there are lots of modes and filters for both the front and rear cameras and it even has Apple’s iPhone X like 3D Portrait lighting effects. The edge detection and bokeh effects are good on both the front and the rear cameras. So, along with good performance and gaming experience, you get good cameras too.

The Honor Play runs on the latest Android 8.1 Oreo based EMUI 8.2, which is Huawei’s highly customised Android skin and comes with a lot of features including dual apps, private space and Android P like pill shaped navigation gestures. The Honor Play also comes with a very fast face unlocking as well as a fast fingerprint scanner situated on the back. It is a dual sim phone supporting 4G and VoLTE on both the sim slots so you can use for e.g. two Reliance Jio sim at the same time.

It comes with 64 GB and 128 GB storage variants, both of which are expandable up to 256 GB but, uses a hybrid slot. Another great thing about the Honor Play is, it has a big 3750 mAh Li-Po battery, which delivers excellent battery backup and also supports fast charging via a 9V/2A charger supplied in the box. It comes with USB Type-C for data syncing and charging.

Honor Play (Navy Blue):

Honor Play (Midnight Black):

Honor Play (Ultra Violet):