Honor 8 Pro: 5 things you need to know - Specs, price, release date and more

Huawei's "for the brave" brand unveils its flagship smartphone for 2017.

Huawei's trendy, millennial-targeting "e-brand" Honor has unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the Honor 8 Pro. As the name suggests, the new device is a larger, higher-spec upgrade to 2016's Honor 8.

With the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus also making their way to the UK in recent weeks, the Chinese company is once again attacking the Android market with two oddly similar smartphone families – but is the 5.7in phablet-like Honor 8 Pro worth a look?

To make that decision a little easier, we've glanced through the specs and launch details and picked out the top five key facts you need to know about the Honor 8 Pro:

It is quite pricey for an Honor smartphone, but still a bit of a bargain

The original Honor 8 launched for at the cut-price £369.99, which considering its glitzy diamond-cut metal design, serviceable processing power and nifty dual-camera, was approaching OnePlus' signature value-for-money level.

The Honor 8 Pro, meanwhile, arrives with an RRP of £474.99. This sounds like a huge leap on paper, but it is worth noting that Huawei's other larger smartphone for 2017, the P10 Plus, retails at just shy of £700. If you are watching the pennies but love big phones, the Honor 8 Pro could be the one for you.

You get a free cardboard virtual reality headset with every device

While every VR enthusiast has likely tried cardboard virtual reality kits by now, Honor is making sure every 8 Pro buyer gets a sample of virtual goodness. It's not only opting for a VR-friendly Quad HD display, but also packing in a free headset with each smartphone.

The phone will also come pre-loaded with Jaunt VR – a VR freebie offering 360-degree video experiences that is also available for Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Google Daydream and other virtual reality platforms.

Honor is promising two whole days of battery life from a single charge

One of the few smartphone design concerns that has not seen much attention in recent years is battery longevity, but Honor could be about to fix all that. Here's Honor's words from the official press release:

"A stand-out capability is its high-density 4.000 mAh battery which works in tandem seamlessly with the latest SmartPower 5.0 technology, providing up to two full days of run-time from a single charge."

It has the same Kirin 960 processor as the Huawei P10

Huawei's octa-core processor, the Kirin 960, debuted in the P10 range and is the chipset of choice for Honor's new flagship too. The in-house processor has compared favourably to Qualcomm's Snapdragon line over the years, so it's fair to expect smooth levels of performance from the Honor 8 Pro.

GPU duties are left to a Mali-G71 chip, which according to Honor "supports cutting-edge Vulkan graphics and computes API and boosts graphic performance up to 400%".

GoPro has helped develop a feature for keeping your photo library in order

Honor has joined forces with action camera specialists GoPro for a new EMUI OS feature called Highlights. According to Honor, Highlights "intelligently organises photos by category and automatically generates video stories that are easily customisable."

With a dual-lens shooter sporting two 12 megapixel sensors and "DSLR-like depth of field effects", the Honor 8 Pro should delight snap-happy punters.