Honor Play first impressions: Flagship gaming on a superb budget

Honor has been aggressive in the recent months — whether it’s the wallet-friendly segment or the premium all-frills flagship category, the brand has kept refreshing its portfolio to stay relevant in the ever-evolving smartphone market. After their impressive (and successful) Honor 10 and the recently released feature-rich Honor 9N, Honor wants to target the sweet middle spot between these handsets – the midrange category. The category has seen competent offerings from Nokia, Vivo, OPPO, and Samsung this year, with Xiaomi soon to battle it out with their upcoming Mi A2. Therefore, Honor prepares its weapon for the segment by re-introducing a trend that hasn't been seen for a while now – offering flagship-grade chips for the price of a midrange smartphone.

Called the Honor Play, this is the first smartphone from their stable to feature the much-hyped GPU Turbo – a feature that aims to improve gaming performance while efficiently using the power reserves. That, along with Huawei’s flagship Kirin 970 chip makes it a sweet deal for mobile gamers on a strict budget. Honor hasn’t hinted towards the prices yet, but rumours suggest this could sit somewhere under Rs 25,000 for the top-end 6GB variant.

Since 2018, Huawei and Honor have certainly cracked the idea of designing eye-popping smartphones. Their recent flagships come dressed in multi-hued glass bodies and narrow-bezel-designs. With the Honor Play, the brand has hit a sweet middle spot – it gets the modern narrow-bezel notched display design from its expensive brothers, but sheds glass for an all-metal chassis. The rear is reminiscent of the View 10 that we saw earlier this year. While glass designs grab eyeballs, they cannot assure the comfortable grip and the robustness of metal – you can go careless with a metal-bodied phone, avoiding bulky cases to keep it away from harm’s way (although Honor still bundles the Play with a protective TPU case if you want to be extra cautious).  The antenna lines on the edges have been incorporated tastefully and the new Huawei-esque 'vertically aligned' branding by Honor does steal glances.

Look around and you will find a USB-C port, a loudspeaker and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The buttons are easy to reach and feel tactile. The front is dominated by a large 6.3-inch IPS LCD display with an aspect ratio of 18.9:9 – thanks to the notched design, which liberates more usable space for the device to stuff UI elements up further. The notch houses the earpiece, a 16MP selfie camera and the host of essential sensors. Due to the hardware limitations of an LCD panel, there’s a noticeable chin at the bottom. Nonetheless, like every Honor device, the Play offers an impressive viewing experience. The display appears to render vibrant colours with adequate brightness. Media consumption on this one should be pleasant. Is this then the best display in this segment? We will figure out the answer over the next couple of days.

Moving over to the Play’s USP, the Kirin 970 SoC is a mighty powerful silicon. Surely, in 2018, it is a generation old when compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 found on this year's flagships. But, when assessed in the segment this one’s going to play (pun intended), it blows away almost every other midrange chip from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

We saw the Kirin 970 drawing scores of approximately 2,00,000 on AnTuTu on previous Huawei/Honor flagships, which is way more than what a Snapdragon 660 or an Exynos 7870 can score. Therefore, performance on the Play should be theoretically fast — and Honor compares its gaming performance (especially with AI and GPU-Turbo) at par with what the SD845 can do. Factor in 4GB/6GB of RAM and the latest EMUI 8.1 based on Android 8.1 Oreo, and you have one beast of a device on your hands. In our brief time with the Honor Play, the UI seemed to be fluid, despite being heavily customised. We noticed no lags or stutters while opening the preloaded apps as well as some social media apps. Casual games do work well, but we didn’t get to flex our muscles on the latest resource-intensive titles yet, which is why will reserve our judgement on the effectiveness of the GPU Turbo. However, we expect the Honor Play to offer smooth gameplay without heating up during intense sessions.

Honor also prides itself with impressive camera performance and the Play isn’t an exception. There’s a 16MP + 2MP dual sensor unit for the rear, accompanied by an LED flash. Honor employs Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS) and Artificial Intelligence Stabilisation (AIS) for stabilising the shots. The camera also gets an inbuilt AI mode (thanks to the Kirin 970’s dedicated NPU) that can recognise multiple scenes and adjust the camera parameters accordingly to deliver a social media-ready edit-free photo. The NPU also takes care of the portrait photos along with the depth sensor – the initial impressions are impressive, with a careful blend of the subject and the background.

With the AI mode enabled, one can really snap some interesting photos. If you prefer natural AI-free colour tones, the Play’s shooter can also deliver on that front decently. The 16MP front camera impresses the selfie addicts too – most of our team members were busy shooting their selfies with the Play. The front shooter is also responsible for the Face Unlock feature, which seems to be effective in most lighting situations. We will hold on our final thoughts for the camera performance in our review.

With a 3750mAh power reservoir, the Honor Play should stand up to a day’s requirements with ease. We will have to see how much drainage occurs while gaming and whether the GPU Turbo’s efficiency is of any use to the Play’s stamina.

Initial impressions:

For a smartphone supposed to sit in the midrange segment, the Honor Play seems to offer tremendous value. Right from its flagship-grade chipset to the impressive display to the seemingly-capable cameras to the stylish aesthetics, the Play has what it takes to the challenge and even outgun everyone in its price bracket. If Honor prices it somewhere around the Rs 20,000 mark, the Play has the potential to be our recommended choice in the midrange category. Honor will launch it on August 6th in two colour variants — black and blue. If the Play has caught your attention, hold on for our final verdict in the review within the next few weeks.

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