Honor Pad 8 heads West with an iPad-rivalling slim build

Honor has a handful of Android tablets to its name, but up until now none of ’em have left China. Now the firm is branching outside of its home territory for the first time, bringing the Honor Pad 8 to the UK and Europe. It’s a svelte slate with a large 12in screen, at an especially wallet-friendly price.

At a barely-there 6.9mm the Pad 8 is especially thin for a value-minded tablet. It weighs in at just 520g, and has screen bezels that are even skinnier than an iPad Pro‘s. It’s arriving in a single colour, the intriguingly-named Blue Hour. The rear camera bump holds a 5MP snapper, and it matched on pixel count by the front-facing selfie cam.

The display itself is a 2000×1200 LCD, with 10bit colour support and a 10:6 aspect ratio that should mean smaller black bars when watching TV-friendly 16:9 videos. It’s backed up by an impressive array of eight speakers, with DTS:X certification meaning it should be able to pump out tunes with impressive clarity and volume for a budget device.

Inside, power comes from a Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 CPU, putting it somewhere between entry-level and mid-range territory. It’s paired with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while a 7250mAh battery is tasked with keeping the lights on. It’ll manage 22W wired charging, too.

It’s running Android 12, with Honor’s MagicUI 6.1 skin sitting on top. It promises cross-device collaboration between your phone and tablet, as well as multi-window viewing for up to four apps at once.

The Honor Pad 8 is available from the Honor UK website right now. Expect to pay £269 for the 4GB/128GB model in Blue Hour colours, with devices shipping to customers in mid-November. Anyone plopping down a pre-order in the next three weeks can score a nice £20 discount over the normal price, and get an Honor Pad 8 flip cover for £15 instead of £25.