There’s a perception out there that smartphone performance isn’t important. After all, it’s not like you’re editing professional images on it, or rendering a movie, or broadcasting live video from your phone, right?
Except that’s exactly the kind of thing people are doing with their smartphones, and why performance does matter. Thanks to smartphone cameras being better than ever, they need more and more powerful image processing – when you have a 12-megapixel sensor, you need the power to make the most of your photos. The same goes for video: shooting Ultra 4K on the phone means you need the power to do snappy editing. And if you’re broadcasting to the world using Facebook Live direct from your phone, you need something that won’t drop every other frame.
Then there are games. Mobile gaming has come a long way from the days of Candy Crush. Now, graphically demanding intense action games such as Vainglory or Need for Speed: No Limits mean you can’t get the best from older phones. You need something new, something that’s been designed for performance from the word go.
Enter the Pro
This is where the Honor 8 Pro comes in. Honor’s latest flagship is designed from the ground up to give you the kind of performance that makes more things possible, faster. The latest octa-core Kirin 960 boosts CPU processing by 18%, while the Mali-G71 GPU beats its predecessor at rendering graphics by 180%, according to Honor’s testing. There’s 6GB of memory, which means that Android has plenty of room to breathe. The specifications of this phone can live with anything else on the market.
Specs aren’t everything
However, those specs would mean nothing if the software couldn’t match it. Over the years, we’ve seen many phones where, on paper, performance should be wonderful – and then found that the software it comes with makes it feel like wading through a swamp, in an old-fashioned diving suit with lead boots.
Honor, though, has created software that matches the hardware. It uses the latest version of Android, which includes its own performance enhancements, but the company has also tailored its EMUI 5.1 user interface to make things faster than any previous version. It’s also focused on usability, with the stated goal of ensuring that 90% of the phone’s features are fewer than three taps away. If you’re coming from a phone where the Android “skin” buries features rather than revealing them, that’s incredibly refreshing.
On the games side, too, Honor has done some good work. The Honor 8 Pro is built from the ground up to optimise the performance of the Vulkan API. What’s Vulkan? It’s a low-overhead, cross-platform graphics API that powers many of the most graphically intensive games on Android. Essentially, the better the support for Vulkan, the smoother a game such as Need for Speed: No Limits or Olympus Rising will run. And because Vulkan is cross-platform, it means that more desktop- and console-class games will be coming to Android.
Overall, then, it’s obvious why you should be thinking about the performance of your phone: if you don’t, you’ll only end up wishing you hadn’t settled for second best.
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