Honor Play Design
The most important feature of Honor Play is its metal unibody which was launched last year. Honor View 10 Is like. if seen Honor 10, Huawei P20 Lite And Huawei P20 Pro The company has used glass back panel. But an attempt has been made to do something different in the latest phone. If we talk about stability and strength, glass body cannot compete with metal. The Honor Play is less sleek than the Honor 10, but it doesn’t feel as premium. Due to its large display and thin body, the smartphone does not fit easily in the hands.
When you look at Honor Play, you will feel that the design has the influence of Honor 10, there are very thin borders on the edge 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 space. It is a bit difficult to hold the Honor Play comfortably in the hand, but despite having a 6.3-inch display, the phone is very compact. Honor Play will be available in Navy Blue and Midnight Black colors in India.
Due to the very thin bezel and edge-to-edge design, the fingerprint sensor in Honor Play is given on the back panel. The phone is quite long, hence your fingers may face some problem in reaching the fingerprint sensor. If the user holds the phone properly then he will be able to easily use the fingerprint sensor. On the right side of the phone, you will find a power button to increase and decrease the volume. Similarly, a hybrid dual-SIM tray is provided on the left side of the phone. If you want, you can install two Nano SIMs or one Nano SIM and a microSD card. Honor Play has 64 GB inbuilt storage, which you can expand up to 256 GB with the help of a card.
There will be a 3.5 mm headphone jack along with USB-Type C port at the bottom of the phone. Apart from this, loudspeaker will be available 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 7.5 mm 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 Kirin 980 processor in IFA 2018. The Kirin 970 chipset is equipped with Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for Artificial Intelligence processing. 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 is 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. 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 uses octa-core Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset which is supported by Mali-G72 GPU. To control battery consumption, you can manually set Full HD+ and HD+ resolution in Honor Play. 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. When using the Honor Play outside in sunlight, the screen appeared very reflective. Some third party apps are not optimized for the display notch. When playing a video app 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 Kirin 970 processor that it is a great chipset. While doing PUBG, Asphalt 8, 4G connectivity and social media multitasking, the 6 GB RAM variant of Honor Play did not slow down or get stuck at all. Honor has given a new antenna design in this smartphone which claims to provide better call quality. The calling experience was excellent even in poor connectivity. While reviewing Honor Play, we did not have any complaints regarding the earpiece. In benchmark tests, Honor Play went far ahead of smartphones like Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo F7 and Vivo V9 in this price range.
Gaming experience in Honor Play is its biggest feature. In China, the company has marketed this handset as a gaming phone. We tested the phone’s GPU Turbo technology by playing PUBG and Mobile Legends. After playing some online matches of PUBG, we saw that the performance of the phone was quite decent. 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 draining rapidly while playing the game, although considering the requirements of the game, there is nothing surprising in this.
We also tried playing the latest Asphalt 9: Legends game on Honor Play and the result was quite good. The company told us that ‘4D Gaming’ will be added to Honor Play in the upcoming OTA update. Honor Play will run on EMUI 8.2, which is based on Android 8.1. We believe that EMUI has improved a lot over the years and 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 easily).
Many unwanted apps are still available. You will get pre-installed games like Asphalt Nitro and Sonic Master in Honor Play. Apps like Mirror, Compass, Phone Clone, Translator and Quick are also available in the phone. We found some of these apps to be of no use. There have been some changes in the UI such as Android Message has become the default messaging app and Google Chrome has become the default browser in Honor Play. Honor Play supports face recognition with a 16-megapixel selfie camera. We found the face unlock feature to be quite accurate. However, it does not work in low light. By increasing the brightness of the display at night, it detects the face easily. We did not face any problem even while using the fingerprint sensor.
Honor Play has a 3,750 mAh battery. The battery lasts a day on 30 minutes of gaming, all 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. Fast charging support is present in the phone, the charger provided with the phone takes about 2 hours to charge from 0 to 100 percent.
Honor Play Camera
Honor Play will have vertical dual rear camera setup. There is a 16 megapixel primary sensor, whose aperture is F/2.2 and a 2 megapixel secondary sensor, whose aperture is F/2.4. The rear camera comes with LED flash. The front camera is 16 megapixels, which comes with 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 Honor 10, Honor Play comes with Artificial Intelligence capture mode. This technique sometimes works well and sometimes not. The photo taken in low light had good color balance, whereas when there was sufficient 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 the 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 features. Apart from this, you will also get slow-motion recording, night mode, time lapse mode, 3D panorama and many other features.
Front and rear camera sensors support real-time Bokeh effect. Portrait mode in the front camera works irregularly. While taking pictures indoors, it could not detect the face properly. When we took the phone towards the light, it started working properly. Selfie shots are quite sharp in daylight but pictures taken in low-light may disappoint you. The rear dual camera setup is capable of recording 4K and front camera Full HD+ (2280×1080) video recording. Honor Play supports electronic image stabilization. Still the video quality is not very good.
our decision
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 quite good. However, some people may not want to buy this handset due to the size and average camera quality. Honor Play has been launched with GPU Turbo.
Honor Play comes with GPU Turbo. Hopefully through OTA update in the coming time. Honor 9 Lite, Honor 7X, Honor 10 And Honor View 10 Smartphones will also be equipped with GPU Turbo.
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. Sadly, it is not available in open sale as promised by the company.