Review: Huawei Honor 7

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei sells its Honor branded phones exclusively through e-commerce platforms in India. Their latest phone, the Honor 7 (`22,999), is competing with the Moto X Play (`19,999).

While we know the X Play’s big screen experience and good battery life, the Honor 7 not only has to match that but also surpass it. But, we aren’t entirely sure if it does.

Design: Well-built but doesn’t look classy

The Honor 7 is a solidly built smartphone with an all metal exterior. Though the metal body looks and feels rugged, it doesn’t really exude the same class as the Honor 6 or 6 Plus smartphones. However, the coarse metal exterior feels more reassuring in hand than glass and offers better grip over the phone. It has a one push button on the left panel. This can be customized to allow instant access to up to three apps on the phone without having to unlock the phone’s screen, using the single press, double press and the press-and-hold methods.

The feature was seen earlier in some Blackberry smartphones, but has been missing in Android phones so far. The camera module on the back is slightly protruded, increasing the chances of it getting scratched or damaged every time it is put down crudely on a table or any flat surface. There is also a finger print scanner there.

The Honor 7 is slightly heavy for a 5.2-inch screen phone. It weighs 157g. While the Moto X Play (170g) is considerably heavier, it is important to remember that the latter offers a bigger (5.5-inch) display and also bigger battery. Also, it has a nice curved design at the back that improves grip. There is also a pattern on the back cover which looks good.

Software: Runs Android with a different flavour

The device runs Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and is slated to receive the Android M (6.0) update next year, though no specific dates are known yet. The phone runs a heavily altered custom user interface, known as Emotion UI. The entire visual experience seems to be heavily inspired by Apple’s iOS for the iPhone. This is a colourful UI with lots of customization options, wallpapers and themes.

Some of the notable elements are the unique lock screen which has wallpaper slideshows and the hidden search tab that shows up when you drag down on the home screen. In comparison, the Moto X Play runs the most basic stock Android interface which offers fewer customisation options. And for all the colour and jazziness of the Emotion UI that Honor 7 has, the simple and familiar layout of the Moto X Play gives it an edge in terms of user-friendliness.

Display: Sharp display but prone to scratches

The Honor 7 has a less than common screen size of 5.2 inches. It has a resolution of 1920x1080p, which is impressive. This is a sharp display with bright colours and good viewing angles. Colours look vivid and rich. The auto-brightness isn’t very effective when it comes to handling the fluctuations in ambient light. Visibility under sunlight is poor due to the reflective nature of the screen, and that also means the display is prone to smudges and scratches showing up easily.

The Moto X Play comes with a 5.5-inch full HD AMOLED display. The bigger display looks more lively, offers more real estate for content and doesn’t suffer from the pinkish tint at low brightness levels that was a very prominent issue in some of the earlier phones in the Moto X series.

Performance: Smooth and consistent

The Honor 7 runs on Huawei’s own Hi-Silicon Kirin 935 octa-core processor with 3GB RAM. This is a relatively less known processor compared with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor which powers up several mid-range smartphones including the Moto X Play. It handled most popular apps, HD movies and games like FIFA 16 without any hiccups or heating up on the back panel. The only let-down is that the phone offers 16GB of internal storage which is half of what the Moto X Play comes with. It is expandable to another 128 GB, through a micro SD card.

The Moto X Play is a pretty steady device with a stutter-free performance. It may be too close to call between the two in terms of how apps and games run. Though the Honor 7 is powered by a 3100mAh battery it could muster over a day and half of back-up on one charge, while the Moto X Play lasted over two days easily.

Camera: Good daylight clicker

The phone has a brilliant 20-megapixel camera which produces sharp and detailed results during daytime. Colour reproduction is accurate too. The camera is fast and features a number of modes such a Slow Motion, Watermark, All Focus, and Super night. For example, All Focus highlights several objects in an image, Water Mark can be used to add a name to an image and the Super Night mode brightens up low light shots. Among all the extra modes on offer, we noticed that Super Night is not very effective and low light shots turned out to be noisy and colourless most of the time. The phone’s front camera offers an 8-megapixel snapper. It is sharp and works well for group selfies.

The Moto X Play has a 21-megapixel camera, but the auto-focus doesn’t always work smoothly. But when it does after you persist with it, the amount of details it can capture are fantastic. The Honor 7 has an edge over the Moto X Play as it offers more features and is more user-friendly.

Verdict

The Honor 7, in isolation, offers stutter free performance, a sharp display and a camera that can take good photos during daytime. However, the Moto X Play has the added advantage of a long battery life, a clean interface that doesn’t present any learning curves for the user and more built-in storage.