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huawei honor 7x smartphone

Honor 7X – The new budget champion

You may have noticed that we were pretty excited about the Honor 7X last month. In fact, if you go look at the hashtags surrounding the launch event, you’ll notice me (@smacula) chucking out tweet after tweet. Luckily, we were able to walk away from the event with one of these amazing phones in our hands, and now you have it, the review. huawei honor 7x smartphone

Honor 7X – Features

The phone is jam-packed with features. Not only does it offer great performance, but the highlight is the price, which is only £269.99 (at the time of writing).

  • 2.36GHz Octa-core Kirin 659 Processor
  • 18:9 Display, Edge to Edge, all screen design, 2160 x 1080 FHD+resolution, 5.93 inches
  • 16MP Dual Lens Camera with PDAF technology, featuring Portrait Mode
  • Selfie camera with gesture control
  • Dual SIM
  • SD Card
  • 4GB RAM, 64GB Storage, expandable via SD Card
  • 3340mAh battery
  • EMUI 5.1 (Based on Android 7.0)
  • Fingerprint sensor

One thing it misses out on is NFC, which means you can’t use it for Android Pay.

Look and feel

The highlight of the phone is the 18:9 Edge to Edge display. The bezel on either edge is pretty small and hardly noticeable. This does mean that if you have a case that goes over the edge, it may interfere with your display. Of course, having a bigger display has its advantages, such as gameplay or merely reading those tweets and articles. The colours are true and sharp. It is easily visible in bright light, and the blue light adjustment also means that you can spend those extra few minutes on your phone at night without it messing with your sleep.

huawei honor 7x smartphone

The overall phone is curved and sits well in your hand. The back features the dual cameras and the fingerprint sensors, while the bottom has a micro USB port and a 3.5mm socket.

While you may be disappointed, the phone looks so good that you almost feel like it needs to come with a USB C port.

The sides feature your usual buttons as well as the SIM slot.

The Camera

Featuring PDAF technology, the camera on the Honor 7X is designed to impress. It even packs in Portrait Mode. The speed is fast, the focus accurate.

The camera allows you to go Pro (adjust shutter, ISO, exposure), try Wide Aperture, do Portrait mode, play with HDR, or simply try the usual things such as Panorama or Light Painting. You even have a mode called ‘Effects’ which is equivalent to Snapchat’s filters.

The overall quality is great, the detail is sharp. Normally I’d load this article up with a few samples. The cats though, feel like I have been oversharing recently and have told me not to. The internet is full of some amazing samples though!

If you had to pick this phone for one thing and one thing alone, it would be the camera!

Performance

4GB of RAM and a mid-tier processor ensure that there isn’t much lag on anything you do. The apps load quickly, EMUI runs smoothly, the fingerprint sensor is instant. You may start to notice a lag if you try and play games or have a heavy duty app do something like video rendering, but overall this will sail through pretty much anything you throw at it.

Battery Life

The battery life comes with the promise of a day. I can happily report that most days I am around 30 or 40% by the end of the day, with no fear of running out. In fact, this is one of the many advantages of the processor used in this phone.

EMUI and Android

Okay, if I had to pick a niggle, it would be the fact that this is based on Android 7.0 and features EMUI 5.1, and not Android 8 and the latest EMUI. However, nothing stopping that from being updated to the latest software. While Android updates are mythical creatures, it has to be said that Huawei (and hence Honor) are reasonably good at pushing updates out for at least a year or so on their newer phones.

More information

More information can be found on the Honor website. It can be bought directly from there, or other online retailers. It retails for only £269.

Verdict

Beautiful phone, lovely screen, brilliant camera, good performance.

The perfect gift for anyone who needs a new phone that doesn’t break the bank.

PS: What makes this a keeper?

As soon as I had finished my review, I handed the phone to my wife. She doesn’t review phones, she just needs something that works and takes good pictures. Needless to say, she is mighty impressed.

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