Gaming phones are all the rage these days, but they don’t come cheap and they don’t come to India. But the latest offering, Honor Play is a gaming phone that doesn’t look like one, but packs in the gaming performance we want. Lets know more about it.
Huawei’s sub-brand, Honor is quite house-hold name now and one of the popular brand name in the market. Its devices like 7C, 7X, 8-pro, the latest 9i and 9-lite are quite going strong in the stores. Launching the Honor Play has given the Honor a upper hand in the budget gaming segment.
DESIGN:
looking at the phone won’t give you a gaming device feeling to be true, it looks quite usual without any colorful lines or aggressive design, but still looks good. The Midnight black give the phone a classy and premium finish. Honor has gone with the metal back on this phone and on the front it looks as usual as we said earlier, with the notch, a chin with branding and a 19:5 display. It’s a 6.3 inch FULLHD+ IPS LCD with resolution of 2340×1080 pixels, which is sharp, bright and gives vibrant colors, with Huawei’s tough glass for protection, sorry Gorilla Glass fans.
The fingerprint scanner is placed at the back, it is fast and accurate as per Honor’s standards till now. On the right you’ll find volume and power button and the hybrid SIM-slot on the left. On the bottom it features the USB-C port, the headphone jack and the speaker grill, we expected the speaker to be more louder because it is a gaming phone, but a budget one, so a bit of compromise is expected.
PERFORMANCE:
The Honor Play comes with Huawei’s flagship Kirin 970 Octa-Core chipset, which itself is very impressive and already tested in their Flagships like Honor 10 and P20 Pro. App loading is fast, multitasking is breeze and the gaming performance is amazing due to GPU-turbo-technology.
GPU Turbo-tech improves the graphic processing efficiency by 60% while reducing the energy consumption by 30%, this mean the optimized games like PUBG will have smoother gameplay and better and consistent frame rate. But in real-time test the GPU Turbo-tech doesn’t make a much of a difference in battery consumption while gaming and gives a tough fight the big guns like OnePlus 6 and Samsung S9+.
SOFTWARE:
This device comes with EMUI 8.2 with Android 8.1 Oreo and like most skins it is feature packed. The EMUI lets you choose if you want an app drawer or not, then there are other things like built-in app locker or private space, point your camera to thing to find out if it is available on Amazon and there face-unlock, which is fast too. There’s also navigation gestures which brings a pill on the screen which has multiple usage.
CAMERA:
The Honor Play come with a 16mp (f/2.2) + 2MP (f/2.4) depth sensor at the back with AI scene detection and 4K video recording too. It takes very good photos when there’s ample lighting, the AI options which detects different scenes, oversaturate the photos and sometimes brightens things up, rather keep it off.
Low-light photos get little noisy and looks average but the portrait mode makes-up for everything with better edge detection and good amount of blur. Compared to Mi Note 5 Pro and Mi A2,Honor Play is definitely great in good light in portrait mode, in low-light Mi A2 wins over but still better than Note 5pro. 16mp (f/2.0) selfie camera comes with portrait mode and portrait light effects too. It takes decent selfies and does smoothen the face.
BATTERY:
This device come with 3750mAH battery with fast charge capability. The battery does drains quickly while playing games but will run easily for more than a day with low to normal usage. The Huawei’s Quick-Charge in the box charges the phone from 10% to 60% in 45minutes and 100% in 1hour 35 minutes.
Conclusion:
To sum things up, the Honor Play is great for gaming and the performance is flagship worthy and all this under the budget. If you’re someone who wants to play games like PUBG, Asphalt9, Marvels strike force etc at high graphics and great frame rate and your budget is around 20,000/- the Honor Play is the best choice. And with upcoming updates, Huawei has also promised of AI gaming, which will give intelligent vibrations and 3D sound effect on wired headphones, this will make playing games even better.
