Honor Play

Honor Play comes with a promise to give its user a fantastic gaming experience. Priced at Rs. 19,999, Honor Play is a powerful mid-range phone for mobile gamers as it delivers on the promise of great gaming experience.

Based on the price range, Honor Play arrives with enough power under its hood. It has a great design and decent camera, making it a good recommendation for anyone looking for killer power with other suitable features at an affordable price.

The Honor Play comes with a full-metal unibody and seems almost similar to the design language used in Honor 10. However, since it does not have the slippery glass rear of Honor 10, it is more comfortable to hold. Plus, the phone is sturdier with a weight for 176g. Coming with the dimensions of 157.9×74.3×7.5mm, it sits well in hand. One problem that appears on the front is the notch. When compared the current flagship designs which dispose of the notch, Honor Play has a notch which takes a lot of screen space and can be distracting. However, the rear feels premium and has better grip than many top-end flagship phones. The edges are rounded too so that it doesn’t dig into the palms.

In low-light, the camera tends to struggle with the details, and the images turn out to be quite grainy with a noticeable loss of details.

The selfie 16MP camera with an f/2.0 aperture is quite impressive and clicks social-media worthy shots. However, while it appears with bokeh-capturing features, the bokeh shots turn out to be quite unimpressive and have worse quality than the bokeh produced by the rear camera.

Honor Play has a 6.3-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. It has minimal bezels around the edges, but the only problem is the huge notch which makes the phone lose some amount of screen space. The display is FullHD+ and the colours produced at quite sharp. The pixels cannot be spotted easily due to the 409 pixel per inch. Brightness is quite high and does not cause any issues in sunlight. However, it is not a display that could be compared to the fantastic flagship display of Samsung Galaxy Note 9 or S9.

Honor Play is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset, made by its parent company, Huawei, partnering it with a 6GB RAM. It is the same chipset used in Huawei Mate 10 and P20 Pro. Its rival is the top-end processor Snapdragon 845, and it turns out to be quite a good competitor. It has enough power to keep the phone experience smooth and prevents any lagging to take place when multiple apps are running on the phone. Gaming experience is also quite amazing on this phone and could be used to play PUBG and Fortnite without any problem. A benchmark comparison with its sister phones saw that the Honor Play achieved a score of 6,602 almost similar to P20 Pro’s 6,775, and beating Honor 10’s 6,570.

Honor Play has a rear 16MP camera with an f/2.2 aperture which is paired with a 2MP depth sensor. The secondary camera helps to take bokeh shots and does shoot photos. The photos are quite vivid and capture enough details. The colour reproduction is quite great producing above-average shots when there is adequate light. However, the bokeh shots disappoint and do not appear to be as great as Honor 10.

Honor Play arrives with a 3,750 mAh battery which is quite a capable battery to power up a FullHD display. It can chug through the whole day in a single charge with medium or intensive use, but heavy use can get the battery to drain a lot. A FullHD video running at full brightness with Wi-Fi on and syncing in progress found that the Honor Play lost 20% of its battery, which is quite below average for a phone in the current smartphone market. Plus, the phone does not come with wireless charging which is a disappointment. However fast charging is available and gets the phone to full power from 0% in just over an hour and a half.

Honor Play looks premium, but the hardware is a letdown. While the performance is quite good, the mediocre battery and the lack of wireless charging in a serious flaw. The phone does not come with good cameras either, which produces just about impressive photos but nothing exceptional. It has been marketed as a gaming phone, and it appears to perform well with games due to the top-end processor. However, it is a compelling handset for anyone else who wants a bit of power in their hands. For a slightly more capable phone which looks better and has better cameras, one could go for the Samsung S9 –  a worthy consideration for any premium user.