Honor confirms February release for Honor 8’s Nougat update

Honor has confirmed a timetable for when the Nougat update will be coming to the Honor 8, officially. The Honor 8 will be updated with Huawei’s newest EMUI 5.0 overlaid on top of Android Nougat 7.0. The Nougat Beta test has already been ongoing for beta testers of the Honor 8 since the end of last month.

EMUI 5.0 brings new optimizations and a learning algorithm that can prioritize your apps based on the ones you use most frequently for optimal performance out of the phone’s Kirin 950. It will also have a more intelligent power management system with a bunch of new power save modes.

The new UI is identical to the one found on the Huawei Mate 9, whose launcher can also be used with or without an app drawer for those who still prefer to have one. The only gripe I had with the Mate 9’s software was the way it handled notifications, but if the Nougat Beta build for the Honor 8 holds true, it should handle notifications no differently, bummer.

The company has only mentioned 'February 2017' as the month for the release of Android Nougat on the Honor 8, so we still don’t know whether it’d be in the beginning or end of the month. Given that the Honor 8’s Beta began seeding toward the end of last month, there’s a generous amount between the start of the Beta and the actual release of the completed build.

As a refresher, the Honor 8 is the brand’s first dual-camera smartphone. This dual camera was derived from the parent company, Huawei, and its Leica-marked P9 with dual cameras. The Honor 8 has a 5.2-inch 1080p screen, a Kirin 950 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of microSD-expandable storage, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner with programmable shortcut key, as well as a dual-12MP camera setup. There’s also a 3,000 mAh battery, whose battery fared quite well in our endurance tests.