Huawei’s Honor 7X, the cheapest phone in the Indian market with 18:9 display as well a dual camera setup. Are these enough to attract users? Definitely not, so let’s dig in deeper into the Huawei’s latest offering.
Looking at the build and design, this is easily the best looking smartphone in this price range, the blue variant with a black front looks magnificent. The overall footprint of 7x isn’t different from its predecessor 6X, its slightly taller, narrower and thinner but has a much larger 5.93 inch display, thanks to the slimmed down bezels. The aluminum back looks great, although identical to Honor 9i.
There are two noticeable changes, one is the horizontal camera alignment and another is the resistance towards fingerprint smudges. The phone feels great in hand the sides are extremely curvy, it’s not single handed usage friendly but it’s still a pleasure using this phone. The buttons to the side feels clicker with nice feedback.
The 5.93 inch 18:9 display to the front is made of IPS LCD with a resolution of 1080 x 2160 pixels which means 400ppi, it’s sharp and has great viewing angles. The screen is a bit reflective but it gets quite bright giving good contrast and colors with an option to change the color temperature as per our liking. Something missing in this phone is the Gyroscope sensor, which can be a deal-breaker if you want to use this phone for VR or to watch 360 degree videos.
Furthermore, the cellular reception is quite good and it supports the JiO VoLTE. The audio output via 3.5mm jack is just average just like most phones in this segment and the loudspeaker output isn’t great either. The right thing here is the fingerprint sensor which is rapid just like other Honor phones, accurate and responsive.
The phone is quite as fast thanks to the Honor’s own Kirin 659 chip underneath, it’s got 4 Cortex A53 cores clocked at 2.36 GHz each and 4 more clocked at 1.7 GHz each. Carrying it day to day task is a breeze, even intensive tasks like editing a raw image or rendering a video is smooth and may outperform its competitors.
Honor 7X runs on MUi 5.1 based on Android 7 Nougat, it’s pretty far from stock skin with quite of a bit uninstallable bloat. If you’re someone who’s okay with using whatever comes with the phone it shouldn’t be an issue for you. On the features front MUI has lot going for it, it has ‘App-twin’ which creates an additional instance of an app so you can two Whatsapp account or two Facebook account there’s an in-built app-lock utilizing which you can unlock apps with your fingerprint. Thanks to 4GB of RAM the Honor 7X was on-point in RAM management with 16 apps working in the background in the memory.
A 3340mAH battery is the fuel for the phone, with light usage it can easily run for a day and a half before running out of charge. With moderate-to-heavy usage which includes an hour of phone call, gaming, a lot of video streaming, and regular social media for two hours, the phone lasted for a day and it takes 2.5hours to get to 100% from a flat battery.
The camera here are 16-mp f/2.2 for regular images and a 2-mp depth sensor for depth or portrait mode. Results are decent, it struggles quite a bit with edge detection, a few blemishes as a result. Pictures clicked outdoor with good lighting conditions are sharp, with great detail level. Color seemed to be over saturated with a pink tint to it, as well as the dynamic range isn’t great too with significant loss in the shadows.
Under the low-light the camera performance is again sub-par, images are bit too dark and have a lot of noise. It has a full-fledged manual mode and dedicated night mode with limited manual controls, so if you know what you are doing you can get better shots than on auto mode. When it comes to selfie the Honor 7X does a really great job, they’re bright, sharp and have a lot of detail, the skin tones and the dynamic range are not bad for a front facing camera. It can shoot 1080 videos at 30fps but with no image-stabilization, the quality is good and sharp with good detail level.
Honor 7X Specifications:
- Android 7.0 Nougat 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 and 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 should you get yourself a 7X? The 32GB variant is priced at 13k while the 64GB will cost you 16K. great design, a solid build, large 18:9 display, rapid fast performance, a manual mode for the rear camera and a feature packed user interface, if these are high on your list of priorities and you care about VR the 32GB variant is to buy in this segment. But if you do give importance to camera performance and stock Android experience you could get the Mi A1. If you have a different perspective do let us know.
