Honor Play Brief Review, Ratings, Pros Cons, Specs, Cases & Covers

Honor Play Brief Review and Pros Cons:

Honor is on a roll in India and they are launching phones at a crazy rate. Till August, we have seen more than 10 launches from Honor. Honor Play is the latest one which is priced under Rs. 20000 and specifications are going to surprise you. Let's take a look at the brief review of Honor Play.

Honor Play is a nice looking phone. The phone has a metal unibody design and has a matte finish on the back which gives it a nice look. Both Black and Blue color looks great. The dua camera setup is placed vertically at the corner and the fingerprint sensor is placed at the center. The fingerprint sensor is quick and responsive.

On the front, we have a notch display of 6.3 inches. The resolution is Full HD+ and the aspect ratio is 19:9. Notch was more of a compromise when it showed up on iPhone X and after that, every OEM copied it like it was some kind of feature. We are not really a fan of the notch but some people do like it. Overall, the phone looks really good and is comfortable to hold.

Honor Play is powered by Huawei's own Kirin 970 chipset which is there on their other flagship phones like P20 Pro, Honor 10, View 10 etc. The Kirin 970 is an octa-core SoC with 4x2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 and 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 cores. It is similar to Snapdragon 835 in performance.  For handling the graphics workloads, Kirin 970 packs an impressive Mali G72 MP 12 as GPU, and It has serious power. Honor has made things even better with GPU turbo which provides better performance and more efficiency. With 4GB of RAM and Kirin 970, you are going to see flagship like performance on the Honor Play. Whether it is switching between multiple apps or playing heavy games, this phone is going to handle it with ease. 

The performance is visible in Antutu benchmark as well. You can expect an Antutu score of around 200000 which is 30-50% more than other phones in this price range.On Geekbench, you will see a single core benchmark score of around 1800 and multi-core score of around 6800.

Honor Play comes in just 1 variant which packs 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of UFS 2.1 storage. You can expand the storage via MicroSD up to 256GB. But it is a hybrid sim slot so you cannot use 2 sim cards with a MicroSD. The RAM and storage are again flagship grade which is something you don't usually see in this price range.

Honor Play comes with a dual 16MP+2MP camera setup on the back and 16MP single camera on the front. The dual camera setup on the back has a 16MP color sensor and the 2MP sensor helps to give a bokeh effect to the pictures also known as portrait mode. The camera can record 4K videos and has EIS-AIS stabilization as well. The camera performance is good in outdoor natural light conditions. The pictures have a good amount of details with natural looking colors. The portrait mode works well.

Honor Play is also using AI in the camera which detects the category and surrounding to optimize the pictures. If you are taking a picture in a park in daylight, it will tweak settings according to it and if you are taking pictures inside a room in low light conditions then settings will be tweaked according to that. It all happens in real time and you don't have to do anything. 

The front 16MP camera also takes decent shots indoors and outdoors. It also uses AI to enhance/beautify your face. Plenty of options are provided to make your selfies look better. Selfie camera is also used for Face unlock which works well and unlocks your phone in less than a second.

Honor is pitching Honor Play as gaming smartphone. In addition to GPU Turbo, there's one other interesting feature which is 4D gaming mode. It takes the gaming experience to next level by providing feedback like vibrations while you are shooting in a game. It is going to drain the battery faster but it is a cool feature.

Honor Play comes with EMUI 8.2 which is a custom skin based on Android 8 Oreo. EMUI has some bloatware but it is not laggy. It has some useful features like dual apps which can come in handy if you want to use multiple accounts on apps like WhatsApp. Overall, the UI looks good and it is responsive as well. You won't face any lag during the day to day usage.

Honor Play comes with a 3750mAh battery which is a good capacity. You can expect a backup of around 1 day on medium to heavy usage with a screen on time of around 6 hours. With low usage, it would last for 1.5 days on a single charge. The phones come with a 9V 2A fast charge in the box which is another plus point.

Honor Play is not water or dust proof and there is no IP rating so keeping it away from the water will be a good option.

So what are we getting at a price of 20000? A good looking phone with a nice large display on the front, a powerful chipset, 4GB of RAM, dual camera, large battery and excellent performance. We think Honor Play is the best phone under 20000 as of now. The only negative point is the availability. It is available via flash sales and the stock is very limited so getting hands on a device is going to be difficult. 

User Reviews of Honor Play:

If you would like to read the reviews given by customers who bought Honor Play, check out the links below

Read Honor Play User Reviews on Amazon