EMUI 8 rollout schedule for various Honor devices detailed
Honor France has tweeted a timeline as to when Honor devices can be expected to be on board with EMUI 8 — Huawei's proprietary skin over Android. The Honor 9 and Honor 8 Pro should start receiving EMUI 8 builds by now while the Honor 7X and Honor 8 will be getting them sometime in Q2 2018.
EMUI 8 is a direct upgrade from EMUI 5.1 as Huawei has chosen to keep the EMUI version number in sync with that of Android releases. EMUI 8 makes good use of the neural processing capabilities present in the Kirin 970 SoC to learn usage habits and tune the performance of apps accordingly. For those handsets not equipped with the NPU, EMUI 8 still offers good performance management and resource allocation abilities. It also brings forth features like Smart Split Screen, text translation using Microsoft Translator, and a floating navigation dock.
It is good to see Honor being upfront about informing as to when updates can be expected for prospective devices. However, availability of EMUI 8 does not automatically mean that Android 8.0 Oreo will come along with it. The possibility of a future Oreo update is not ruled out as Honor President, George Zhao, did confirm last year that many Honor handsets are slated to get updated to the latest Android version.
Also, it must be noted that many EMUI 8 features are hardware dependent and not all handsets would be able to make use of all features.