Honor 8 Pro With It Awesome Look: Review

Huawei has steadily been releasing devices in India under its sub-brand Honor. With this strategy, the brand has managed to place one of its devices in every price segment below Rs. 30,000. The Honor 8 (Review) has been its top-of-the-line device so far, and now it looks like the Honor 8 Pro will take over that position. The Honor 8 Pro sports dual rear cameras and is priced to go up against the new kid on the block, the OnePlus 5 (Review). So does this phone have what it takes to dethrone one of the most popular models around? Let’s find out.

Honor 8 Pro design

The design of the Honor 8 Pro is slightly different when compared to its sibling, the Honor 8. The older model has a glossy glass back, whereas the Honor 8 Pro gets a metal unibody. It's available in two colours, Midnight Black and Navy Blue, and you’ll be happy with either one. The smartphone is quite sleek, measuring just 6.97mm in thickness, and has curved sides. What is surprising is that Honor has managed to cram a 4000mAh battery into this body.
At the front, there's a 5.7-inch LTPS panel, with super-slim side borders. The top and bottom are thicker, and there's an Honor logo below the screen. Above it, you'll find the 8-megapixel selfie shooter along with the earpiece and a couple of sensors. The power and volume buttons are on the right side. The power button is well within reach but you might have to stretch a little to reach the volume controls. The left side of the Honor 8 Pro only has the SIM slot. Honor has placed the USB Type-C port and the 3.5mm headphone jack at the bottom, along with the loudspeaker and the primary microphone. At the top, there's a secondary microphone and a IR emitter which lets you control household appliances.

The highlight of the Honor 8 Pro, the dual rear cameras, are placed at the back in the upper left corner, along with a dual-tone LED flash. Unlike many other phones, both cameras are fitted flush with the body of the smartphone, under a glass window which should keep the lenses from picking up scratches. The fingerprint scanner is also at the back, and we found its placement to be a little higher than what would have been comfortable. You’ll have to stretch your finger a little or shuffle the device in your palm to reach the fingerprint scanner.

Honor ships this phone with only an 18W charger and USB cable, but the party trick is that the box itself can be converted into a cardboard-style VR headset. You get all the required materials, including the lenses, in the box.

Honor 8 Pro specifications

The Honor 8 Pro has some impressive specifications. To start with, the 5.7-inch display has a Quad HD resolution, which translates to a dense 515 pixels per inch. The front panel is made of Corning Gorilla Glass for protection, with 2.5D curved edges. The display has punchy contrast and is quite vivid. Some users might not like the aggressive colour reproduction, and sadly, there is no way to tone it down. You can only tweak the colour temperature to suit your liking. You also get a night mode that claims to reduce strain on the eyes in low light. We liked watching videos on this display. The single speaker was loud enough, but we did feel that front-firing stereo speakers would have done better justice.

Huawei has used its own Kirin 960 SoC to power the Honor 8 Pro. It is an octa-core processor with four Cortex A73 cores running at 2.3GHz plus four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. This seems slightly dated when compared to the Snapdragon 835 which powers the OnePlus 5. The Honor 8 Pro gets 6GB of RAM along with 128GB of storage which is expandable using a microSD card in the hybrid SIM slot. We found that the firmware occupies close to 16GB of space on the phone, but we still had over 100GB free to use.
The phone also has Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi ac, and NFC. The Honor 8 Pro is a dual-SIM device with two Nano-SIM slots. There is support for 4G, VoLTE, and carrier aggregation.

Honor 8 Pro software and performance

Honor has the 8 Pro running on EMUI 5.1 which is a slightly newer version than what we saw on the Honor 8 Lite. The UI is based on Android 7.0 Nougat, and our unit also had the June security update installed. With 6GB of RAM at its disposal, the Honor 8 Pro had no issues when loading apps and games. Even when switching between apps, we found that the device would retain them in memory, reducing reload times. After a day of use we had over 3.5GB of RAM free on average, which is great.
You also get a one-handed mode which makes it easier to use this big device. Fingerprint scanner gestures let you pull down the notifications shade and dismiss notifications as well. There are a few apps from Honor that come preloaded, but you can uninstall most of the bloat.

The software has a few battery saving options baked in. There is Power Saving mode which limits background apps and disables auto-sync, as well as an Ultra Power Saving mode which switches everything off allowing connectivity only to apps you select. We also found a Screen Power Saving option, which claims to lower the resolution of the display to conserve power. We couldn’t see this taking effect as our device reported QHD as the resolution all the time.

There's a voice control feature built in which responds to the phrase ‘Dear Honor’. In case you can't find your phone, you can loudly ask the device where it is and it will respond by playing a loud tune and triggering the flashlight. You can also try using custom commands, but we found that this did not work most of the time, making the whole feature somewhat pointless.

We ran the Honor 8 Pro through a couple of benchmarks to see how it fares against the competition. The phone returned 124,151 in Antutu, as well as 1,877 and 6,222 in the single- and multi-core tests in Geekbench. It managed to push out 56 frames per second while running the T-Rex test in GFXBench. While the scores are good, devices based on the Snapdragon 835 including the OnePlus 5 performed better.
The phone lasted for 10 hours, 19 minutes in our HD video loop test, and we could get through a full day with medium use.

Honor 8 Pro camera

The highlight of the Honor 8 Pro is its dual 12-megapixel rear cameras. Unlike smartphones that have a telephoto lens on the second camera, these two are used as independent RGB and monochrome sensors. Honor claims that the monochrome sensor can absorb more light which results in better details. To leverage the hardware, Honor has built its own camera app that offers multiple modes to choose from.

While Auto mode is set by default, you can take control using the Pro mode for stills and video. You can also set it to monochrome mode which uses only the monochrome sensor to deliver a black-and-white image. We found that the phone would get warm when using the camera even though it managed to run cool at other times including when gaming.

The photos with this phone turned out really good, and details really were better than average. Colours were accurate and we did not find any chromatic aberration or purple fringing when shooting against the light. Macros were also impressive, and the phone managed a good amount of separation between subjects and backgrounds. In low light, we saw that the camera would sharpen images which improves visibility at the cost of noise and some loss of detail. Selfies were also good, and we noticed that the camera app smoothens them. By default, the camera app adds a watermark advertising the name of the phone. You can disable this, but the option is buried within the Settings menu. We hope this option isn’t turned out by default in the units that ship to the consumers.

The Honor 8 Pro can record video at 4K but the ability to continuous autofocus is lost at this resolution. You can switch to 1080p at 30 or 60fps to enable it. We found noticeable lag in the viewfinder while recording video and panning from side to side, but it does not affect the output.

Verdict

Honor has built the Honor 8 Pro with the best technology it has to offer, which is at par with some of the best in the industry. The Kirin 960 processor is the most powerful silicon that Huawei currently makes, even though it falls behind the Snapdragon 835. The Honor 8 Pro also runs latest version of EMUI. Compared to the OnePlus 5, you get twice the storage and a higher resolution screen at an even lower price.

The camera performance is quite good and so is the implementation of the dual-camera functionality. The monochrome sensor does help and we were impressed with the level of detail in every picture. Overall, we were happy with the photos we took with the Honor 8 Pro.

It does seem as though the Honor 8 Pro is a good all-rounder. It might not be the leader of the pack but it isn’t far behind, and definitely looks like a much better deal than the slightly less expensive Samsung Galaxy C7 Pro (Review) and Moto Z2 Play (Review). For Rs 29,999, it is considerably more affordable than the OnePlus 5, potentially making it just as much of a flagship kille

Read More

Facebook Reportedly Working on a Group Video Chat App Inspired by 'Houseparty'

Facebook is reportedly working on a stand-alone app that would soon help its over two billion users make live group video chats on its platform.
According to a report in The Verge late on Wednesday, the app that copies technology startup Life On Air's popular group video chat app Houseparty was recently demonstrated for employees and is being targeted for a fall release.
The new app has the working name 'Bonfire'. Details about 'Bonfire' are still unclear though it was described as "essentially a clone of Houseparty".

Also Read: Facebook Profile Picture Guard; How to use new tool

Facebook's move comes after Life On Air had helped make live broadcasting popular with its app Meerkat, which inspired its eventual competitors Facebook's Live and Twitter's Periscope.
Houseparty is especially popular among teenagers and by November 2016, it had 1.2 million users spending a total of 20 million minutes on it daily.

It works by notifying a user's friends whenever they have the app open, inviting them to hang out virtually on their smartphones.
According to the report, employees at Facebook were also recently shown an app called Talk, designed to encourage younger people to communicate with their grandparents using video chat.

Read More

New WhatsApp Features Introduced and Spotted in 2017

In 2017 WhatsApp introduced many features in beta and stable versions,

Most notable is the new Status feature

WhatsApp has also been testing the new Recall feature for months now.. 

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, used by over 1.2 billion people worldwide and 200 million in India alone. Despite its success, the Facebook-owned company has not become complacent and always keeps the competition on its toes by releasing new features every few weeks. 2017, of course, saw the overhauled WhatsApp Status (an aping of Snapchat), but there have been many other small updates this year that didn't get as much attention.
 From increased media sharing limit to video streaming, we take a look at all the new WhatsApp features released this year alone. While going down this memory lane, we’ve ranked features in the order that we feel made the most impact (or will make, if in beta) in user experience.

1. New revamped Snapchat-like Status feature

Perhaps, one of the most important updates this year, the new Status feature was rolled out to all users globally in February. The new WhatsApp Status feature replaced the old text form of status to allow users to change their status to a short video or multiple photos that will automatically disappear in 24 hours. Even though this feature was clearly introduced to combat Snapchat competition, it overhauled the way users interacted on the app daily.

2. Media sharing limit increased to 30

This change is significant because WhatsApp is one of the primary platforms for media sharing after an event, get-together, or any social meeting where pictures and videos are taken. The media limit was first at 10, and this increase to 30 was a welcome change by all users. It was first spotted in Android beta in January, but was later rolled out on all platforms eventually.

3. Recall or Revoke feature

This feature is still not out in the stable version, but has been spotted on various occasions. It’s important on a chat app because it lets you recall sent messages. The feature in the many possible forms it could arrive would allow users to recall or 'unsend' messages they have been sent to their contacts, or even edit them. The feature, was earlier seen on iPhone beta version, and was also spotted recently on WhatsApp Web as well.

4. Two-step verification

This feature was rolled out in February to all users as an optional security feature. With this feature, users are now able to verify their number when they install the app on a new device more securely. Users will have to provide a six-digit passcode (created by them using this feature) when registering their phone number with WhatsApp again - or any attempt to verify their phone number through the app.

5. All file type transfer

The company is slowly rolling out support for all types of file transfers (including archives) on Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone with a limited number of users, removing any hindrance of file sharing on WhatsApp. This new feature will now allow you to share video in a wide variety of formats, MP3 songs, or even APK files for that matter on WhatsApp. The file sharing limit will still be at 128MB on iOS, 64MB on Web, and 100MB on Android.

6. Ability to queue messages on iPhone

While WhatsApp had this ability on Android for a while now, iPhone users finally got it in January. This ability to queue messages even when in areas of poor or no connectivity was a big miss for iPhone users, as it prevented them to send messages at all in areas of poor connectivity. Now, all users can just send a WhatsApp message to a group/individual even when connectivity is unavailable, and the message will be sent automatically once they get connectivity again.

7. Reincarnation of Text Status

After the introduction of the new Status feature, support for the old Text Status feature was ended. This created a huge uproar among users, and the feature was then brought back on popular demand. The feature is now available for iPhone and Android users both.

8. Photo Bundling, Video Streaming, Photo Filter features

WhatsApp introduced some nifty features to elevate media sharing. This includes photo bundling into an album, video streaming, and photo filters. The Photo Bundling feature allows users to send photos and videos to your contacts as an album. WhatsApp users can now send a bunch of photos to their friends, who will receive them bundled as an album and not as before, one after another. Once the album is opened, all images are shown on a single page. The feature is already available for iPhone users and is in beta for Android users.

The video streaming feature was first spotted in Android beta, but was rolled out in the stable version to iPhone users first. This feature allows its users to watch shared videos while they're being downloaded in the background. It will use your Wi-Fi or cellular data to buffer a shared video, while it's still in the downloading process in the background. Earlier, WhatsApp users had to wait until a video gets completely downloaded to watch it - depending upon WhatsApp auto-download setting.

Recently, WhatsApp also added the ability to add colour filters to the media that you send in chats for iPhone users. Head to WhatsApp, go to the individual or group chat that you want to send the media to, capture or select a photo, video, or GIF, and swipe up. Swiping up will pull out five photo filters that you can choose from. These are Pop, B&W, Cool, Film, and Chrome, but we expect WhatsApp to add more in the future.

9. Night Mode, Quick Reply button, and ability for Siri to read messages out loud

For iPhone users, WhatsApp recently introduced a new night mode feature for its camera for low-light photography. Interestingly, the Night Mode icon appears by default only when the camera sensor detects low-light conditions, and not otherwise.
In April, WhatsApp also gave more abilities to Siri. Four key highlights include - you can ask Siri to read out your latest messages; visual improvements to the Calls tab, Contact info, and Group info screens; ability to select multiple statuses at once in the My Updates screen which you can forward and delete; and support for Persian language.
Another iPhone-only feature was the Quick Reply feature that allowed users to reply to an individual just by swiping right on a specific text in chats. This reply shortcut is particularly useful in group chats where you speak to multiple users at once.

10. Chat improvements

To improve the basic handling of chat and the way you communicate with the screen while chatting, WhatsApp has made several tweaks this year. Most notable is that Android users got a new separate video call button and saw the relocation of the attachment button. 
Earlier, the video calling feature was hidden within or grouped with the voice calling button, and one would need to tap twice in order to choose video calling from a pop-up menu. The attachment button was relocated to the bottom within the text bar. You'll now see the little attachment feature right next to the camera icon in the text bar. Notably, the text bar too got a new look with rounded corners rather than the square-shaped box of old.

With the new Pinned Chats feature introduced in May for Android users, WhatsApp allowed pinning of up to three contacts on top of rest of the conversations. WhatsApp is also testing a new feature that lets you send multiple contacts at once. Earlier, users were limited to send just one contact at a time, but now that limit has been revoked.
This feature was spotted on Android beta, and should roll out for everyone soon.
Spotted in Android beta was also emoji search that brings the ability to search for emojis based on keywords.
This nifty feature was first possible through third-party apps, but now the ability is coming to the in-app keyboard as well. There were also new font shortcuts spotted in beta for bold, italics, and strike through. This would remove the need to add text inside asterisks while typing for making it bold, or type phrase between underscores to italicise.

11. Change Number and Live Location feature

Lastly but importantly, WhatsApp was recently reported to be testing a new feature on the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile platform that could make life less painful when changing your contact number. In trying to ease the transition, it is testing a feature that will notify your friends and family about your number change for you.
 The Live Location sharing feature was also spotted on Android beta, hinting that it will make its way to WhatsApp soon. This will presumably turn location sharing on as a broadcast - enabling contacts to see each other on a map.

Read More

Music star popularly known as "WIZKID" shows off with parents - Birthday

 

Wizkid is celebrating his mum, who turned a year older today July 4, 2017.

The 'Come closer' singer took to Twitter to talk about his mum saying he has been on the phone with her for an hour.

Wizkid's mum (Instagram)

"On the phone to mama for 1hour! My fav woman," he tweeted.

Meanwhile, Wizkid's parents are still staying in Ojuelegba.

The Real After Party's Bootleg Kev & DJ Damage sat down and talked to WizKid. While chatting with the 'Ojuelegba' star Wizkid made mention of the fact that he moved out of the ghetto 'Ojuelegba' at 15.

According to him, "I moved out of the ghetto when I was like 15/16. My parents still live there they don't want to leave.

I just got them a nice house and they were like "we're not leaving." Adding, "Unlike the ghettos in the U.S, we don't have cable TV and Internet in the ghetto."

 

Wizkid and parents
(Instagram)

Wizkid is doing great things. His first body of work under Sony/RCA Records “Sounds From The Other Side” will be released on July 14, 2017.

This year alone, he has picked up awards and shiny trophies from iHeart Radio, Echo, BET and Billboard.

 If you have found this article informative, share to friends, and also drop your commend about it on the comment box. Keep visiting for more from us.. Enjoy your stay!

Read More