Honor Play Review with Pros and Cons

Honor Play is a midrange smartphone with a special focus on gaming. It has Huawei’s flagship HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset, notched display, dual camera setup and the bunch of other useful features. In this Honor Play review, let’s try to find out the strengths and weakness of this device.

Honor Play Review with Pros and Cons

Honor Play Pros

Design and build quality

Honor Play comes with a metal unibody design. With minimal bezels in the sides of the screen, a tall and thin display panel makes it compact and feels sturdy.

Display Panel

The device comes with 6.3-inch full-HD+ IPS LCD panel has a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels and a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The quality of the panel used is impressive. It delivers good color reproduction and has great viewing angles. Brightness is also decent.

Performance

Huawei’s flagship HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset with 6GB of RAM and GPU Turbo option technology delivers the great real-world experience. Whether it is a multitasking or heavy games, the device does not disappoint. Honor Play comes with a new antenna design to improve call quality. Signal reception and cellular call quality are best in the segment.

Battery Life

Honor Play comes with 3750 mAh battery with Huawei’s fast charger. Battery life decent and manages to complete the full day with medium to heavy usage.

Software and Fingerprint scanner

Huawei’s custom skin EMUI 8.2 on top Android 8.1 Oreo does provide the good user experience. It packs useful functions such as one-handed mode, navigation gestures, a Themes catalog, Wi-Fi+ etc. The face recognition was fast and accurate. Sound output via 3.5mm headphone jack is crisp and loud.

Honor Play Cons

Here is the list of Honor Play cons which we felt could have been better.

Camera

At the rear, Honor Play sports vertically aligned dual camera setup. First one is 16-megapixel primary camera with a f/2.2 aperture. Another one is the 2-megapixel depth sensor with a f/2.4 aperture. This is assisted with dual LED flash. There is a 16MP front-facing camera.

The rear camera does take good images in most of the situation. However, at times it fails. The hit or miss performance is a bit of concern considering high standard set by recent  Honor smartphones. Video recording and front facing camera performance are decent and at par with the competition.

Relatively bigger size

It is subjective. Because of the large 6.3-inch display screen, in spite of narrow bezels, the device feels a bit uncomfortable in hand.

Weekly Sale model

Currently, Honor Play is selling through amazon.in. The sale happens once in a week at a specified time. A limited number of the device will be available. So it is difficult to buy one for yourself unless you are very quick in ordering.