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HUAWEI nova 8 Review

Charles TYK

Introduction

The HUAWEI nova 8 is the latest nova series phone available in Malaysia, at least for now. Marketed as a high-performing vlogging smartphone, the phone comes with plenty of features, enhancing the consumer’s entertainment experience. Without further ado, let’s dive into the full review.

HUAWEI nova 8 Specs

Design

In terms of design, the HUAWEI nova 8 looks closer to most flagship phones nowadays. The phone has curves on both sides, we’ve not seen that many Chinese phone makers did this for phones at this price range.

The phone has a hole-punch selfie camera at the center top of the screen, I must say it’s a huge hole-punch camera, which you will definitely notice. The top and bottom bezels have the same thickness, good job for the consistency!

The volume rocker and power button are located on the right side, it’s a little bit hard to press since the side frames are so thin due to the curved screen. The bottom houses the microphone, USB-C port, and speaker grille.

The back of the phone has a dazzling matte design, together with the standard nova branding. According to HUAWEI, the rear camera system design is inspired by the rings of Saturn. The HUAWEI nova 8 has a pretty unique design and you can definitely differentiate it from other phones.

Display

The HUAWEI nova 8 sports a 6.57-inch Full HD+ curved OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. The screen shows up to 1.07 billion colors with △E＜1 high color accuracy. It’s a pretty impressive display, one of the best in its class.

Performance

Powering the HUAWEI nova 8 is a Kirin 820E processor with 8GB RAM and 128GB internal storage. Unfortunately, the international variant doesn’t come with the Kirin 985 chipset like the one in the Chinese market. The performance is pretty much the same story as other Kirin chipsets — doesn’t outperform its rivals but the temperature is kept under control and doesn’t consume much energy.

Software

The HUAWEI nova 8 runs on EMUI 12 without Google Mobile Services. It’s not running on HarmonyOS 2 like the HUAWEI MatePad 11, but the user experience is pretty similar. However, you don’t get certain features from HarmonyOS. Still, everything feels quite similar, it’s just that you don’t get the same app support as an Android phone.

Camera

The phone packs a quad-camera setup on the back — 64MP f/1.9 main + 8MP ultra-wide + 2MP depth + 2MP macro. It has a 32MP front-facing camera for taking selfies, which also supports Super Night Selfie 2.0 mode automatically optimizes portrait skin quality, and increases background details.

Ultra-Wide

16MP Main

64MP Main

Night Mode

Image quality generally is quite good, but it’s not the best camera experience I’ve ever had. Photos are a little bit grainy especially when it comes to low-light images, the overall color tune is not as eye-pleasing as its competitors, but that is HUAWEI’s way of tuning the photos. You can view all the camera samples here.

Battery Life

The phone packs a 3,800mAh battery that also supports 66W HUAWEI SuperCharge. The battery life is actually quite good but it can be better if the battery capacity is bigger. The phone can last a day or even two if you are not a heavy user.

Final Words

Retailing at RM1,899, the HUAWEI nova 8 is available in Blush Gold. To be honest, it’s hard for me to recommend this phone, especially when HUAWEI has announced its successor after just a couple of months when the phone launched. Don’t get me wrong, the nova 8 is a nice phone with great design and an impressive screen. If you are planning to get this phone, perhaps you can wait slightly longer for the price to drop or just go for the nova 9.

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