Honor has been successful so far with its line of quality but affordable smartphones and among the ones gaining popularity is their Honor Play. The Honor Play truly lives up to its name by donning powerful specs built for mobile gaming.
Design & Construction
Compared to the other two phones I’ve reviewed recently, the Honor Play’s exterior is much more considerate. The smudge-proof back panel and rounded edges make it easy to grip when playing a game with a landscape orientation. It also has a good weight to it, not too heavy nor too light. The width is just right and can be used with one hand. The fingerprint sensor on the back is very convenient and easy to use, allowing you to instantly unlock the phone. Though the loudspeaker was placed at the bottom, it’s not easily covered when you hold the phone horizontally while playing.
Display & Multimedia
The Honor Play’s 6.3-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen displays sharp images and text due to its high pixel density. It also works well with watching videos and browsing photos. Its 19.5:9 aspect ratio might not be fully optimized for some mobile games, but turning off the notch and disabling fullscreen mode can fix this. The Honor Play also has a Touch-disable mode that prevents mistaken operations when your phone is in your pocket or bag. This is pretty handy when you’re on-the-go, but forgetting to turn this feature off can really disrupt your game as I’ve experienced when I first loaded a round of Mortal Kombat X.
As mentioned before, the speaker placement can be a bit off but it’s much more tolerable than the Oppo F9. Regardless of the positioning the loudspeaker works well and can still be heard throughout an open room. It also has a 3.5mm earphone jack, perfect for when you’re commuting and need something to keep you entertained.
Camera
The Honor Play is equipped with a 16MP+2MP dual rear camera and a 16MP selfie camera. Pictures turn out crisp and vivid but there are a few catches. One is that even with the AI enhancements on, the rear cameras find it hard to keep the right mix of saturation when put in bright lighting conditions. If you turn the AI off, the image ends up too desaturated. The selfie camera is also harder to use, as the local camera app doesn’t allow both manual and AI adjustments and you are only left with either a small range of filters, the aggressive beautify mode, or to drop both completely.
Honor Play Sample Camera Photos:
Performance
The Honor Play really lives up to its name in terms of gameplay. I tried out the usual graphics-heavy games and found no issues while playing. Even more surprising is that it ran games better than the Oppo F9. For example, when upgrading a character in Mortal Kombat X, sometimes the game’s “back” button doesn’t work in the F9 and instead of returning you to the battle screen, it reloads the character stats. Here with the Honor Play, I didn’t encounter this error. I also like how the local home buttons move around when you flip the phone as it always stays on the right, unlike in other phones where you need to take note which way the home buttons are located once the screen flips.
Another thing to love about the Honor Play is its screen recording feature. It can now support internal audio recording so it doesn’t need to rely on the microphone anymore. The only downside to this is while recording, it will not play out the sound so you’d have to play in silence. This can be an advantage in disguise if you are recording your live narration on a separate device.
Since the Honor Play is powered by a Kirin 970 chipset, its flaws on the camera performance are quite understandable. This phone was designed with mobile gamers in mind, which makes its processor optimal for playing even the heaviest of games. Now that the GPU Turbo update is here, you can only expect for the Honor Play to do better in processing game graphics. The 6GB RAM can handle multiple tabs at the same time, so you can play more than one game at a time. I tried out waiting for my energy to refill in Mortal Kombat X, so I left the tab on and loaded Injustice 2. There were still no lags and I was able to play both games smoothly. The 3,750mAh battery capacity is large enough to last a whole day of gaming. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Honor Play scored a benchmark of 212344 on Antutu. It even outranked the Huawei P20 Pro that’s supposedly twice as expensive.
The Honor Play is truly worth raving about. It keeps up to its promise of delivering amazing speed and performance. It’s definitely a great bang for your buck as it can do better than most smartphones out there with the same price tag. The Honor Play is available nationwide for a suggested retail price of Php 15,990.
Thank you Patrick of NoypiGeeks for the Honor Play Photos
