If you still believe that newly entered Chinese smartphone companies stand nowhere around the major smartphone brands, then you need to pay a little more attention to the market. Many Chinese OEMs are bringing the great smartphones with impressive specifications and features, while keeping the costs low. Huawei is also one of those OEMs who have made a fair impression on the consumers in a short period of time.
Honor 7 is the latest addition to the Honor range of smartphones that retains every plus point of its predecessors in a polished package. Honor aims at making budget-friendly phones with solid set of specs. Honor is trying to play smart and stay a step ahead of its competitors. But does it really manage to do that? Let’s find out.
[stbpro id=”info”](Also See: Huawei Honor 7 FAQ, Pros & Cons)[/stbpro]
Huawei Honor 7 Hands On Review [Video]
Huawei Honor 7 Quick Specs
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Build Quality and Design
Honor 7 comes with a bit of added quality to the shell this time. Unlike the other smartphones of this range it comes with a premium aluminum unibody design. The design appears to be quite industrial, the devices Honor 7 sticks to the metal backing and chamfered edges. It gives a great feel and also tackles the slipperiness of the phone. However, the top and the bottom edges are molded in metallic-finish plastic which looks quite different from the metal back.
The handset feels solid with a thickness of 8.5 mm and weight 158 grams, the use of metal wrapping the body makes it tougher than its predecessors. The bezels along the sides are thin but the ones on top and bottom take some extra space, which could be utilized to reside the spear grills on front. This design allows great one hand usability and a good feel.
On the front panel, it has the speaker grill, LED notification light in between the front camera and a front flash on the top. Some thing strange about the design is the bottom front which has a broad bezel, but does not have the capacitive navigation button or any other button.
On the back, there is a 20 MP camera with dual-LED flash on its right, and the fingerprint reader is located right below the camera.
Up the top is the IR blaster, 3.5 mm audio jack and a mic.
At the bottom there is a microUSB port with two speaker grills on each side of it.
On the right side of the phone, there is a volume rocker and the power/lock button which is placed within comfortable reach.
The Smartkey button is on the left side, residing below a Nano SIM Tray + SD card support. But the version of Honor 7 outside india is a Dual SIM supported.
Huawei Honor 7 Photo Gallery
Display
The Huawei Honor 7 features a 5.1 inch IPS LCD display (1920x1080p) full HD producing a pixel density of 424 ppi. The screen is actually quite bright and crisp. The brightness is considerably really good compared to other devices of this range, which makes it perfect for outdoor use. Viewing angles are also excellent, a small amoung of colour degradation can be noticed while tilting but it is very normal with any other device. Colour production of the screen is really good and we can say it will not cause any difficulties to the viewers.
Honor 7 UI
The Honor 7 comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop with a heavily customized Emotion 3.1 UI. Emotion UI is Huawei’s self customized skin that includes a number of redundant features. The EMUI seems highly inspired by the Apple’s iOS. Unlike most of the Android launchers who offer a separate app drawer from the home screen, EMUI places everything in a single place just like the Apple’s iOS. Similarly, swipe from the bottom draws a quick shortcut to camera, torch, calculator and sound recorder. It has few more tweaks that make it look like a bi-racial version of the iOS.
The UI feels unfurnished in some parts, the stock Android experience is actually much attractive and user friendly in my personal opinion. Stock Android lovers may not enjoy the UI experience on this phone.
Fingerprint Sensor
The highlight of this device is its fingerprint sensor which not only reads your fingerprint, but also works with different gestures. You can enroll 5 fingerprints in the settings. It works just fine and the positioning is also good in terms of accessibility.
The only drawback of the positioning is that one might accidentally tap on the sensor which takes you back to the previous screen, I did tell you about the gestures; yes, it is one of them. The fingerprint sensor is useless until the phone is in your hand, if it is on a table with the face up you have no option other than using the pin to unlock the phone.
Performance and Gaming
Honor 7 has a pretty convincing set of specs and stands ahead of most of the competitors. It comes with a 2.2 GHz Octa-Core, 64-bit Hisilicon Kirin 935 CPU and Mali-T628MP4 GPU and 3GB of RAM.
For the price, the Honor 7 has a great offer for the users in terms of performance. This handset is able to handle almost everything you throw at it; luckily, does not heat up much if compared to the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810. In my opinion, this phone will never upset you with the performance and will surely impress you with its processing speed and quick response.
To see how much gaming stress this device can bear, we ran a graphic greedy game on it. We installed Need for Speed No Limits, the game took a little time to load, however, after loading the game it runs smoothly with the highest graphic settings. The animations and the intense action scenes were fluid and the gameplay was good overall. We did notice a little bit of shutter while playing online races, but that goes unnoticeable in most of the situations.
Benchmark Scores
Antutu- 49008
Nenamark2- 59.5 fps
Quadrant- 14163
Camera Performance
Honor 7 comes with a 20 MP rear camera and on the front; it has an 8 MP fixed focus selfie camera with a flash. Rear aperture is f/2.0 and front aperture reaches f/2.4, they can let adequate quantity of light to enter the camera. The Sony IMX230 sensor is used in this camera which uses Phase Detection Auto Focus for a fast 0.1 seconds AF time.
In good lighting conditions, the camera performed amazingly. It produces images with bright and crisp colours, autofocus works flawlessly and quick, details were accurate and the pictures looked amazing in all the aspects.
In low-light conditions the Honor 7 camera struggles a little bit, which is pretty normal with most of the cameras. There is a small amount of noise is visible in the low-light but that is still better than most of the smartphone cameras you’ll find in the market.
The front facing camera can take decent images, but definitely not as convincing as from the main camera. It comes with a fixed focus which means everything ends up in focus. The front LED is not very bright but still helpful in darker conditions. You can enjoy clicking fun selfies with the number of modes available with the camera software.
Camera Samples
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- bmd
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- mde
Battery Performance
It has a large 3100 mAh battery. I recorded the battery drop rate while doing different taks on the phone and found impressive results in the end. The results are mentioned below:
Browsing – 2% battery drop in 10 minutes of browsing.
Gaming- 4% battery drop in 10 minutes of gaming.
Video Playback- 3% battery drop in 10 minutes of video playback.
[stbpro id=”alert”](Also See: Huawei Honor 7 Camera Review)[/stbpro]
Price and Conclusion
Honor 7 is priced at INR 22,999. It has been very impressive and proved to be a solid mid-ranger with some great features. The fingerprint sensor is the smartest in the league, and the camera does really well too. Overall, the Honor 7 is a value for money deal offered from a promising Chinese brand. The EMUI may feel irritating on the Android 5.1 Lollipop, but it still manages to cover up the flaws with its tough performance.
