Honor 8 Pro is official: 5.7-inch display, giant-ass battery, Kirin 960

Honor's latest phone for Europe is a beast, and it'll cost £475 in the UK.

Huawei's Honor brand has taken the wraps off its latest high-end handset, which just happens to be the biggest, highest-specced Honor phone to date. The Honor 8 Pro breaks cover today, running the latest Huawei hardware and software — and the overall package looks to be competitive with the likes of OnePlus at its launch price of £475. (If it looks familiar, that's because the Honor 8 Pro landed in China a few weeks back as the Honor V9.)

The Honor 8 Pro's internals are in the same league as the Mate 9 and P10.

For your money, you'll get a slim, stylish metal exterior and a 5.7-inch Quad HD display, powered by the latest Kirin 960 CPU — previously seen in the Mate 9 and P10. That's backed up by a whopping 6GB of RAM and 64GB of base storage, plus expansion via a hybrid slot, which can hold a second SIM or a microSD card. The Honor 8 Pro packs a big screen, but it's also the slimmest handset we've seen with a 4,000mAh battery, which promises top-notch longevity. When it comes time to charge, the 8 Pro supports Huawei's 9V/2A quick charging (but not the newer, speedier Super Charging tech.)

The camera setup will be familiar to owners of the Honor 8 — on paper, the hardware appears identical to that phone's dual-lens 12MP setup, however Honor is leveraging the improved ISP (image signal processor) and general number-crunching abilities of the Kirin 960 to step image quality up a notch compared to the 8 Pro's predecessor, particularly in low light.

This is also the first Honor phone to ship with EMUI 5.1, the latest version of Huawei's software layer, based on Android 7.0 Nougat. That's the version that first debuted on the P10, with improved touch responsiveness, low-level tweaks for extra performance, and video-wrangling features in the Gallery app, thanks to the "Highlights" feature developed in partnership with GoPro.

The Honor 8 Pro's leading color in the UK is the "navy blue" you see above, and it goes up for pre-order today on Huawei and Honor's vMall store. Regular sales begin on other outlets, including Amazon.co.uk, from April 20. There's no word on any U.S. release plans for the Honor 8 Pro at present — today's announcement only covers European markets.

Tempted? Check out our full review for more on the Honor 8 Pro!

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