Honor's latest flagship smartphone, the Honor 8, is essentially a repackaged Huawei P9. It comes with the same rear dual-camera lenses (one colour and one monochrome) and uses a near-identical 5.2in screen size and 1,920 x 1,080 resolution.
However, if you think Honor and Huawei are trying to sell you the same phone twice, you'd only be partially correct, as the Honor 8 has an all-new design that really catches the eye. That's partly down to its rear glass panel, which is made from 15 different layers of materials, giving it what Honor's calling a "3D grating effect".
That doesn't sound very luxurious, but the way its 7.5mm-thin chassis catches the light is certainly very pleasing to the eye. The white and black versions don't do it justice, but this 3D grating effect really comes into its own on the sapphire blue version. Couple this with its smooth texture and lightly chamfered edges, and it's arguably one of Honor's prettiest phones to date.
As with all of Honor's flagship phones, you'll find a fingerprint sensor on the back that does double duties as a touch-gesture control. Whereas previous Honor fingerprint readers have given you the option of answering calls and bringing down the notifications menu with a quick swipe of your finger, the Honor 8 adds the ability to swipe left and right through your photo gallery as well. The sensor is fully clickable, too, allowing you to assign different app shortcuts to single and double clicks as well as a long press.
Inside, you'll find an octa-core 2.3GHz Kirin 950 chip and 4GB of RAM. This is a slightly different chip than the P9, which had a Kirin 955, but the Honor 8's Kirin chipset is also joined by an i5 coprocessor, allowing the phone to switch on quicker and capture health data in the background. As for storage, the Honor 8 comes with 32GB as standard, but this can be expanded by up to 128GB via microSD.
There's a 3,000mAh battery onboard, which Honor says should be able to provide just over a day's use for heavy users and just over a day and a half for more moderate users. I'll have to see how these figures hold up once I get one in for testing, but even if you do run out of juice, the Honor 8 supports fast-charging via its USB Type-C port, with Huawei claiming around 47% battery in just 30 minutes.
The one thing the Honor 8 doesn't have in common with the Huawei P9 is its price. Available for £370 SIM-free as well as on contract from Three, the Honor 8 is considerably cheaper than the P9, potentially making it a better-value handset overall, provided its contract prices (which had yet to be announced at time of writing) aren't too extortionate and its battery life isn't significantly worse than its Huawei cousin.
I'll be able to bring you my final verdict once review samples arrive, but if you fancied the idea of having a monochrome smartphone camera without having to shell out lots of money for it, then the Honor 8 could well be one to watch.