Huawei’s sub brand Honor has decided to divert its attention on the “gaming phone” category with the launch of Honor Play. This device is devoted towards gaming, but that is not the only significant feature of this device.
Great camera and AI features along with huge battery capacity in low price tag make it a perfect device that anyone could dream for. Honor play is certainly for those who want all significant features in their devices on economical price.
Honor Play Review
Display
The Honor Play comes with a 6.3-inches screen size, 19.5:9 aspect ratio display, along with a 2340×1080 pixels resolution. This sharp resolution gives you a pixel density of around 409 pixels per inch, and screen-to-body ratio at around 83-percent.
Processing Power
Inside the Honor Play, there is a Kirin 970 chipset, with either 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB of built in storage. This Kirin 970 chipset also provides users best graphics and gaming experience. Storage and processing power is pretty enough to run all the applications of the device effectively. There is also a micro SD card slot available – it uses the second SIM card slot. This gives the users option to either use it as a dual-SIM phone or add some additional storage here.
Software
Honor Play has Android 8.1 Oreo on-board here, with EMUI 8.2, which is slightly newer than what was witnessed on earlier Honor smartphones like the Honor 10 and Honor View 10.
Camera
Photography has been the forte of Huawei devices. On this Honor Play, users will get a dual-camera setup. This is certainly the most popular feature that is present on almost every phone these days. There’s a 16-megapixel main camera with an f/2.2 aperture, and there is also phase-detection autofocus.The camera has multiple modes: Aperture, AR lens which includes the Emojis. You can use any filter you want. There are portrait, photo, and video options. In camera settings there are other options for photography lovers, such as pro, slomo, night mode, and many more.
The secondary sensor is a 2-megapixel camera that has a f/2.4 aperture and that will only be used for depth sensing. On the front, there is a 16-megapixel sensor that has a f/2.0 aperture and is capable of recording 1080p video at 30fps.
Inside the Box
Unboxing the phone, you will find the SIM tray unlock tool, transparent back cover which is made out of plastic, a USB C cable, and a charger. Honor Play has the headphone jack, which is definitely a good thing, and somewhat of a surprising feature these days. Honor Play also has dual speakers here, using the earpiece as a secondary speaker. NFC is also included, but no FM radio support is present. Additionally, there is support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and there is A-GPS, GLONASS and BDS here for location tracking. Finally, the Honor Play sports a 3750mAh battery capacity.
Hardware
The Honor Play uses a metal unibody with the sides being curved a bit, which makes it feel amazing in the hand. The back and sides are red, which really looks good with the black front of the Honor Play. The Honor Play has a nice etched in design on the back, with the Honor logo in the middle, but that logo is really not all that visible. Honor Play comes in Red, Midnight Black, Navy Blue, Violet color options.
The volume rocker is on the right-hand side, above the power button. These buttons are pretty easy to click, when you are trying to turn down the volume with the phone in your pocket or something. The bottom of the Honor Play is where you’ll find the USB-C port, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and the main speaker. The fingerprint sensor is placed on the back, with the dual-camera setup in the upper left-hand corner. On the front, it is covered with screen. But that’s to be expected, with an 83-percent screen-to-body ratio.
Performance
Honor Play is equipped with the Kirin 970 chipset and it is definitely a powerful chipset. As this chipset is the in-house production, Honor is able to optimize its software a bit more for this Kirin 970 chipset. Therefore, it has the capability to run all applications and games smoothly. Even with the presence of 4 GB RAM, the device never slows down and stays speedy.
Honor Play definitely does not disappoint you in gaming. Honor has “Game Acceleration” feature here which will optimize the settings of the phone for playing games. It also keeps notifications from coming in and disturbing you, which is also nice. If you were looking to pick up this Honor Play for gaming, it’s definitely a good choice.
The only disadvantage here is that there is only 64GB of internal storage. It would have been great to see 128GB or more internal storage included, as most games can’t be stored on the micro SD card, and these games do take lot of space.
The Honor Play also support GPU Turbo feature, which essentially over clocks the GPU a bit, therefore, you can get even better performance when playing certain games. Currently, this feature only works with two games right now: PUBG Mobile and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. It is expected to make its way to more games in the near future. It not only gives better performance, but ensures that device does not really heat up.
