Honor brand of Huawei, which was launched in India almost a year ago has achieved tremendous successs in India with its Honor range of smartphones for mid-segment. Honor smartphones come with powerful hardware features and these devices are priced very attractively in India if you compare the similar specifications on branded smartphones. To take its success story forward, Honor brand has launched today its latest Honor 7 smartphone which was launched globally earlier. Honor 7 has been priced very aggressively at Rs. 22,999 and will go on sale in India on 15th October via Flipkart.
Design and Premium Feel
Honor phones are known for its exquisite design philosophy and the company has taken a step further with Honor 7. This phone has unibody metallic design. It comes in a fine metal frame and an aluminium back cover with a ceramic-coated finish, which serves two purpose. It gives this phone an elegant look and avoids slipperiness. This phone has thickness of 8.5 mm and its weight is around 157 grams, but you you can hold it comfortably. This phone has thin bezels along the sides of its 5.2 inch display, and which allows it to use with single hand quite comfortably.
The volume rocker and the power button have been placed on the right side of the device. All the buttons are very responsive, easy to press, and offer a good amount of tactile feedback. On this phone, there is one innovative feature and that is SmartKey button on the left side. This is very useful addition in the Honor 7. After setting up the Smart Key button, it enables you to launch up to three different applications or commands. You can achieve this with the help of a single click, double click, or a long press of the button.
The Honor 7 is a Single SIM device. Above the SmartKey button, single sim card tray has been provided, with one of the SIM slots also doubling as a microSD card slot. Since it has 16GB of internal storage, the seond slot will be definitely used to expand its storage capacity.
At the bottom is the microUSB port, flanked by two grills, giving the appearance of a dual speaker setup, even though it is actually only a single speaker on the left side. Above the display is a speaker grill which also houses a notification LED, and there is also an 8 MP front-facing camera with a flash. On the back is the 20 MP camera sensor, coupled with a dual tone LED flash.
Bright Display
The Huawei Honor 7 flaunts a 5.2-inch IPS LCD display, with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 424 ppi. This size of display for easy handling and it reproduces crisp, bright text and vibrant colors. The viewing angles are good and there is no problem in using it outside.
Performance
Under the hood of the Huawei Honor 7 is an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 935 processor, clocked at 2.2 GHz combined with the Mali-T628 GPU and 3 GB of RAM. During the short time spent on this phone, the opeing of apps, switching between apps went smoothly and we did not face any signs of lag or stutter. However, we shall be able to comment about gaming performance especially of highly-resourceful games when we receive this device for detailed review.
Fingerprint Sensor
Honor 7 has fingerprint sensor on the back which rests on square inset panel and you can register as many fingerprints as you wish to. It is very accurate and seldom fails to read the fingerprint. Besides unlocking the phone, you can use the fingerprint sensor as a button to start various tasks. For instance, by swiping, you can open up the apps screen and can also click the selfies.
Camera
The Huawei Honor 7 is equipped with a 20 MP rear camera with a dual LED flash and an f/2.0 aperture. It also house an 8 MP front camera with an f/2.4 aperture. The camera can click an image in just 0.1 seconds, and sometimes it is faster than this also. To enhance the quality of the pictures, this camera comes with various capabilites such as super night mode, panorama, slow motion and Good Food mode to make the images of clicked food look mouth-watering and appealing. Overall, it is capable of reproducing bright and detailed shots in well-lit environment. We shall have to check in details the performance of this camera in dimly lit conditions.
Similarly, the selfie enthusiasts will not be disappointed with its 8MP wide angle lens with a flash, which will be boon in low light conditions for clicking perfect selfies. It is capable of reproducing impressive and bright selfies. With its beauty mode, you can refine the clicked images.
Software
This phone runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop with the latest version of Huawei’s Emotion UI on top, but without Google’s material design, which takes some time to getting used to it. For instance, there is no app drawer and all the apps appear on your homescreen by default. You can put them away in different folder and can bring up by pinching the screen. Its default keyboard is also little bit difficult to use due to its spacing of letters but you can overcome this problem by uploading Swiftkey app which makes typing, predictive text and auto correct much more easy and intuitive. Otherwise, this phone provides fairly neat and clean user experience.
The Honor 7 also comes with voice capabilities, such as the ability to be woken up with a designated command. It also has knuckle-tap feature to take screenshots with ease by tapping on the screen twice with the knuckles for an instant full-screen capture.
Battery
The Honor 7 is packed with healthy-sized but non-removable 3100 mAh battery, which is capable of lasting full day depending upon the type of usage. It also has fast charging capabilities and one can charge the battery to 50 per cent in 30 minutes.
Hardware
The Honor 7 comes with 3GB RAM which is more than adequate for multi-tasking, surfing the web and even for intensive gaming. It has 16 GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded upto 128 GB via microSD card. This phone supports all standrand connectivity options and also supports NFC and 4G LTE.
Conclusion
The Honor 7 comes with excellent design, good display, camera and highly useful fingerprint scanner. Its battery also appears to be quite impressive but we shall be able to comment on this aspect when we test the phone for quite sometimes. We are not fans of superimpsoed UI as it makes the working quite complicated. But one get used to this also in very short span of time. If you ignore this aspect then it is serious contender for your consideration and will definitely prove good value for money.
