Huawei Honor Play, the Ultimate Budget Gaming Smartphone

Huawei has recently became world’s second biggest smarpthone manufacturer and it’s hard to wonder why, judging from their rate of new releases and the value they provide with their inexpensive and yet top of the line devices. Honor Play is the latest smartphone designed for gamers that tries to provide top notch experience for ever growing number of Android players.

But does the company succeeded in this task and delivered proper gaming phablet? You bet! Read our review and find out what you can expect from Honor Play.

Performance and capabilities
Honor Play works on Huawei’s proprietary HiSilicon Kirin 970 Octa-core that provides plenty of power for all your needs: multimedia, web surfing, apps and especially gaming. This flagship processor goes toe to toe with the Snapdragon CPUs, and what’s important, it’s not power hungry because it’s built in 10 nm technology. Combined with 4 GB of RAM (6 GB version is also available) it offers reliability for everyday usage and you can easily open up dozen of apps and browser tabs without breaking a sweat. 64 GB is a sizeable amount of storage, so you’ll be able to hold a lot of files on this smartphone, and if it’s still not much for you, option to expand it up to 256 GB through memory card is open. Unfortunately, this MicroSD card slot is shared with a second Nano SIM card, so the phone can’t work in Dual SIM + memory card mode.

This graphics chipset uses GPU Turbo mode that provides hardware acceleration, more computing power and enhanced experience for the games. Huawei claims that this can improve frame rate up to 60 percent, while saving 30% energy, but there’s one caveat: it must be implemented in a given game. Currently only two titles can take advantage of this hardware feature: PUBG Mobile and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, with more coming soon. Anyway, the super popular PUBG works exceptionally well on Honor Play and overall experience is ultra smooth, with no frame skipping and random fps drops, so it clearly shows how much potential this GPU Turbo has.

Honor Play works on highly customized Android Oreo, called EMUI 8.2. It resembles a lot Apple OS and differs from vanilla Android with some enhancements and a few preinstalled apps. If you’re a purist that prefers standard user interface though, you can customize it so that it looks like the usual UI in settings. Some interesting gimmicks that you can find in EMUI are face recognition, lift to unlock and a lots of themes (even more waiting for download). It also supports updated Game Center with 4G Game Shock and 3D Game Sound that emulates surround effects when playing on headphones.
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Display and cameras
Unsurprisingly, Honor Play follows latest trends and has huge all-screen, no bezels panel, with notched display. It is 6.3″ inch big and displays at maximum resolution of 2340 x 1080 px, which provides ultimate gaming experience for online shooters, MOBAs and casual games. Colors are really vibrant and the resolution can be downgraded in settings to save some battery powery. It reacts without noticable slowdowns, refreshes instantly and is really responsive to the touch, which will help you win your online skirmishes. It’s quite reflective, but we haven’t had any problems using it in direct sunlight, so you can play the games or browse websites outside.

Rear camera consists of dual lens 16.0MP + 2.0MP sensor that makes capturing bokeh pictures easy. Phase detection auto focus allows for hip shooting quick pictures and single LED makes it possible to captures decent photos at night. There is no optical image stabilization (OIS), which could be viewed as a big problem, however this is perfectly rectified by artificial stabilization that comes through extensive AI provided by the firmware. This also allows for controlling the depth of bokeh effect, not only before taking picture, but also afterwards. Single lens front camera is nothing special, but it certainly can handle some nice selfies, especially that you can improve the looks by using rich beautifying filter options. This is not a smartphone designed for professional photographers, but despite that you can expect some nice images out of its cameras.

Other features
3750 mAh Li-Po battery has a bit over average capacity, comparing to similar smartphones, and surprisingly, it holds power quite well, which is especially important when playing games that drain juice at faster than usual rate. Nevertheless, it’s not on Ulefone Power level, so be prepared to charge it daily or once per two days – it’s industry standard for similar phablets.

Unfortunately, there are no stereo speakers, which is a bit of shame considering it’s a gaming phone, but at least the single speaker provides HiFi sound with top clarity, and it’s surprisingly loud, so you can blast the music without need to plug in Bluetooth speakers (but please don’t do it in public!). Sound is processed by Huawei Histen chipset, a capable audio decoder used in every new Huawei smartphone and tablet.
huawei honor smartphone

Design and looks
Full-metal unibody looks really slick, and while it doesn’t provide the same experience as Xiaomi’s ceramic or glass cover, it looks fancy and it’s also really solid, so it shouldn’t fall apart once you drop it on the floor. It is thin and quite light for such big display (176 g), so you’ll have no trouble handling it single-handedly. Notch contains camera and sensors and located at the top is full array of ports, including Type-C USB and 3.5 mm jack, so you can plug in standard phone earphones. Fingerprint scanner is typically located at the back and you can use it to quickly unlock the screen in a fraction of a second. In addition, AI-features can also recognize your face for front camera unlocking.

In conclusion
If we could compare Huawei Honor Play to any phablet, it’s quite similar to recently released Huawei Honor 10, but with faster hardware and bigger screen, aimed at achieving more FPS in games and providing overal better experience for players. It could be a worthy competitor to the gaming beast that is Xiaomi Black Shark, also available on GearBest, though it doesn’t have the same state of the art Snapdragon CPU. But for the meagre price of just $415, it might be really the best bang for the buck in gaming phablets niche. It has some shortcomings, namely the EMUI OS which some people might not be happy with, especially if they’re accustomed to vanilla Android, but besides that, this device was really well thought by Huawei. Are you an avid mobile player that requires top notch performance from your gear? Pick it up, you won’t be dissapointed.

Where to buy?
Huawei Honor Play is available at low price of $415.37 at GearBest.com with inexpensive shipping, get it while it’s on sale!

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