First there was the Honor 8, an ultra-shiny 5.2-inch smartphone. Now there's the Honor 8 Pro, a 5.7-inch flagship which packs oodles of power into a lesser shiny body.
The 8 Pro - which is the V9 in other markets, such as India - has a number of firsts for Honor. It's the first time the company has squeezed a Quad HD resolution into any of its phones, with those 1440 x 2560 pixels making for ultra-crisp viewing. It's also the first time Honor has released a phone so big - the Pro is almost like-for-like in size against the iPhone 7 Plus, but a touch slimmer in its sub-7mm form. And within that shell there's a huge 4,000mAh battery capacity - matching that of the Mate 9.
At launch a key element of the Honor 8 was its ultra-glossy rear, which caught the light in a dazzling display of reflections… and fingerprints. The 8 Pro has changed things up: this time its soft matte rear comes in blue, black or gold options, which we feel look more refined overall.
Under the hood the Honor 8 Pro comes with the latest and greatest Huawei flagship power. That means an octa-core Kirin 960 processor with 6GB RAM, just as powerful as you'll find in the Huawei P10 Plus. The only difference compared to its Huawei cousin is that the Honor has 64GB on board storage rather than 128GB - but there's a microSD slot, so that's no bother.
Like the original Honor 8, the Pro also comes with dual cameras. Both are 12-megapixel sensors, with 28mm f/2.2 equivalent lenses delivering images to colour and monochrome sensors. There's none of the Leica-endorsed snazziness of the Huawei flagship range here, but the Honor does offer the Wide Aperture mode in its software, for a software-produced f/0.95 equivalent, to deliver those soft, melty backgrounds.
Perhaps best of all is the price: at £475, the Honor 8 Pro undercuts the current flagships on the market by a couple of hundred pounds, while remaining within reach of the £399 OnePlus 3T.