A Bezel less screen, dual cameras and all-metal build on a smartphone that doesn’t cost much. Let’s read on more to know more about this amazingly mid-ranged Android Champion, Honor 7x.
So right of the back the Honor 7x has a design that looks very familiar, it will remind you of iPhone 6 or iPhone7 design. It even has antenna bands near the top and bottom, but they’re pretty small and blend quite well with the metal especially on the Mate Black version. Otherwise it is a seamless metal design rounded corners and sides and it feels really comfortable to hold. It’s relatively easy to operate one-handedly because it’s a pretty narrow phone and even though the metal is completely smooth it doesn’t feel all that slippery.
On the back side is the fingerprint sensor and it’s in a nice and comfortable spot that easy to reach with your index finger and is also very fast to unlock. There’s a single speaker on the bottom and is a perfectly serviceable speaker but there’s nothing too amazing about its sound. The phone does however make up for with a headphone jack which is something that has slowly faded away in 2017. The only thing seems a little weird is exclusion of USB type-C port and uses the Micro-USB.
The nice thing about the Honor 7X though is that it features a lot of current smartphones trends that we already saw in flagships and it’s cool that Honor is putting these things in much more affordable package. For the starters it has a 6-inch 18:9 screen with a 2160 x 1080 resolution and is surrounded by super thing bezels so it’s pretty much all screen on the front.
The screen is LCD instead of AMOLED so it’s not going to have those deep blacks or the contrast ratio of AMOLED screen, but it still looks pretty nice. It’s bright with great viewing angles and the colors are vibrant enough that it still looks pleasing to the eye while watching videos, playing games or just casually using the phone. Even though the screen is 1080p instead of qHD it still looks really sharp. The Honor 7X also come with dual camera, it has a 16-mp primary shooter and a secondary 2-mp lens.
But unlike many other smartphones with dual cameras this lens isn’t use for taking photos, instead the secondary sensor is there to capture depth information so you can get the ‘Bokeh effect’ with the camera’s wide aperture mode. The wide aperture mode has been available on Huawei’s and Honor devices before, but it’s still pretty cool. It lets you change the aperture to as wide as f/.95 for that extremely shallow depth of field look and as narrow as f/16 if you rather have everything in focus.
The nice thing about this mode is re-adjust the aperture and point of focus after the snap which can give your photos an entirely different look and it’s pretty impressive how well it works. Portrait mode is available on both the rear and front facing 8-MP camera but it’s not the best portrait mode in the competition. It has some trouble separating the background from the foreground and sometimes the Bokeh bleeds on to the subject.
It is still a nice feature to have if you want to add a level of depth. In terms of general picture quality it’s actually a decent shooter. In good lighting you can capture nice detail and color reproduction is pretty pleasant with just the right amount of vibrancy and saturation to make the photos pop. It does fall apart in low light and there is no OIS so the results are very muddy and soft in appearance with lack of sharpness when you zoom in.
In terms of hardware there’s Huawei’s in-house Kirin 659 chipset with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM. This is more of a mid-range processor and isn’t going to quite as powerful as flagship. Multitasking, launching app, playing games or just casually though the interface is pretty smooth on 7X. It is smooth and responsive and you won’t face any lags during you daily usage. It has a hefty 3340mAH battery to get you through the day, battery life is pretty good. You can expect 4-5 hours of screen on time which is more than plenty for the full day, with hours of gaming, videos, music and other typical activities.
On the software front the Honor 7X is running Android Nougat with EMUI 5.1 on top which is pretty heavy skin that changes a lot of aesthetics of stock Android. There’s no app drawer by default but you can enable it through the settings menu. It does offer you other options like customization soft keys and the ability to run the multiple clones of the same app which is pretty useful for apps like Facebook and Snapchat.
Honor 7X Specifications:
- Android 7.0 Nougat OS with EMUI 5.1
- Hybrid Dual SIM Support
- Fingerprint sensor
- 5.93 inch Full HD+ 18:9 2.5D curved glass display
- 2160 x 1080 pixels resolution
- Octa-Core Kirin 659 processor (4 xA53 at 2.36GHz + 4 x A53 at 1.7GHz) with MaliT830-MP2 GPU
- 4GB of RAM
- 32GB / 64GB internal storage memory, Expandable up to 256GB using microSD card
- 16 Megapixel rear camera with LED flash, secondary 2 Megapixel camera
- 8 Megapixel front-facing camera
- 4G VoLTE, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, GPS / GLONASS
- 3340mAh battery
So how much all of this cost? It is actually affordable. It’s available in the US for $200 that is Rs.13, 000/- approx., which is a pretty insane and aggressive price point. What makes this phone more special is that you get a lot of flagship characteristics like 18:9 screen, the metal build, and the dual cameras at a fraction of the cost of flagships. Overall it’s cool that Honor is able to deliver this type of experience with very few compromises, so if you are tight on budget and want a hot flagship, this is the phone for you.
