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Android Nougat now rolling out to Honor 8 beta testers, first screenshots show off cleaner UI

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Earlier this month Honor was on the lookout for beta testers for Android Nougat on the Honor 8 smartphone. After finding a handful of candidates, the company is now pushing beta builds to devices, and today we’re getting our first look.

Screenshots found by GSMArena show off Android Nougat with EMUI 5.0 on the Honor 8, and things are certainly much cleaner. That’s because Android Nougat on the Honor 8 comes with Huawei’s EMUI 5.0 software layer, also found on the recently launched Mate 9, which we reviewed just the other day. This new software layer, as we’ve shown you, makes EMUI feel much more like Android, rather than a poor iOS clone.

As noted in our Honor 8 review earlier this year, the Honor 8 is a fantastic device, but its current software holds it back in a big way. 9to5Google‘s Stephen Hall stated “the reason I say that it’s [EMUI] the bane of the phone’s existence is that this could have been a top-to-bottom, little-to-no-compromises, all-around-fantastic Android phone at an amazing price point. I would have potentially even called this device the phone of the year. I would have said that this was a no-brainer purchase for literally anyone… if the software had been better.”

It’s unclear when Huawei will push Nougat to the Honor 8 on a larger scale, but if all goes well in the beta tests, it probably won’t be long.

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