Huawei Honor 7x

Honor 7X: An honourable mid-range phone

Honor, a subsidiary of the world’s largest telecommunication equipment manufacturer Huawei, launched yet another budget masterpiece: the Honor 7X. The Honor 7X is a successor to the Honor 6X which was released earlier this year. The Honor 6X was an excellent smartphone, and you can read more about it here. The Honor 7X does an excellent job of carrying on the company’s legacy of creating high-powered, reasonably priced devices. Without further ado, let’s take a look at what the Honor 7X is all about

Honor 7X: Design and Build Quality

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The sturdy all-metal body is one of the first things that got me hooked on the Honor 7X. The construction is solid, sturdy and has a premium feel to it. The 2.5D glass transitions seamlessly into the aluminium chassis. The dual-cameras and LED flash are colinear with the top antenna band that runs across the back panel. The fingerprint scanner sits towards the centre of the rear panel, underneath the dual cameras. The bottom edge houses the 3.5mm headphone jack, micro USB port and the loudspeaker. The volume rockers and button occupy the right edge and the SIM card tray blends perfectly into the left edge.

I subjected the Honor 7X to some light drops from varying heights, and I’m happy to say that the body held its own, without so much as a scratch. It lacks any form of water resistance, so I’d recommend keeping it away from moisture. One-handed operation can be a little tricky owing to the large screen size, but Huawei has you covered as the Honor 7X can be run in one-handed mode, which I’ll explain in detail in a bit. My only grievance with the body is the fact that it’s a fingerprint magnet and smudges easily. The situation is easily remedied by carrying a microfiber cloth.

Honor 7X: Display

The Honor 7X rocks a 5.93-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 2060x1080. The ‘FullView’ display (which is the company’s branding for less-bezel displays) has an aspect ratio of 18:9, and it looks beautiful. The panel is sufficiently bright, and legibility under direct sunlight is manageable. The colour accuracy of the panel is on par with that of other LCD panels and does an excellent job of not oversaturating colours and images. The 1080p version of the 2006 movie A Scanner Darkly was the video of my choice to test HD content, and I can state that the experience was nothing short of mind-blowing, at least for the price. The Honor 7X lets you take advantage of its FullView display by running apps at an 18:9 aspect ratio. Most apps work just fine, barring a few games such as Clash Royale, which has not been optimized yet.

One of the most notable features of the display is that its colour temperature can be fine-tuned to your requirement. The UI is a spherical colour palette with three radial edges representing primary colours namely red, green and blue. A point in the palette lets you select the tint of the panel. By default, the point is set at the centre and two other presets namely Warm and Cool can also be selected. The Warm preset gives the panel a yellowish tint and the Cold preset a bluish tinge.The Honor 7X also includes an “Eye Comfort” mode which filters out blue light in an attempt to reduce eye strain. The feature comes in handy at night or during prolonged viewing. The mode can also be triggered automatically at a specific time of the day, from within the settings. Personally, I found it handy while using the Honor 7X in a pitch black environment and could squeeze a few more minutes of usage before my head begins to hurt.

Honor 7X: Camera Quality

Huawei was one of the first companies to introduce the concept of dual cameras in smartphones, starting with the Huawei P10. The technology has evolved and its progress is visible with the dual 16+2-megapixel primary camera on the Honor 7X. The 16-megapixel lens acts as the primary image sensor and the 2-megapixel lens as the depth sensor. The depth sensor comes in handy to create a depth of field effect a.k.a bokeh effect. The secondary sensor, however, is not operational at all times and is available only in a few modes such as Portrait Mode and Wide Aperture Mode. Some prominent features present in higher-end Huawei phones are stripped away, but we’re not complaining. The camera's performance is still on point and arguably better than most similarly priced devices. I’d go as far as saying that the Honor 7X’s camera can give some affordable flagship devices such as the Nokia 8 a run for their money. Despite the absence of a dual-tone LED flash, low-light images retain most of their clarity and have minimal noise.

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The camera UI is easy to use and offers a variety of features to help you capture the perfect image. The portrait mode is ideal for photos shot between a distance ranging from 0.5-2m. A depth of field effect is applied to the image, and facial features are enhanced, both of which can be fine-tuned later in the image gallery. The Wide Aperture mode creates a bokeh effect at the desired point in an image. The Pro Mode lets you fine-tune the ISO, white balance, exposure and other parameters, but I’d recommend leaving it be unless you know what you’re doing. There are a lot of additional features as well, but I’m going to have to cut it short, as it would take me a long time to get into each one of them in depth. I’ll include some screenshots of some of the camera UI features, so that you may get a rough idea of what the Honor 7X is capable of.

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The 8-megapixel secondary camera is capable of capturing high-quality selfies. The portrait mode is also available in the secondary camera, so you can capture that perfect selfie which looks like it has been taken from a more powerful camera. (I’m serious, one person thought that it was shot from a DSLR). You can even add Snapchat like filters to your photos (yeah the ones with animals). The beauty mode does what the name indicates, makes you beautiful. The skin tone is made a few hues lighter and blemishes, if any, are masked. The secondary camera also lets you shoot in panorama mode, allowing you get that perfect group selfie you’ve been looking for. The front camera lacks an LED flash and illuminates the screen to a bright white, to aid in low light photography, which is what most high-end phones do. Results can vary according to ambient factors such as location and the source of illumination.

Honor 7X: Performance

The Honor 7X is powered by an octa-core Hisilicon Kirin 659 chip with four cores clocked at 2.36GHz, and the other four clocked at 1.7GHz. I had high expectations from the Honor 7X, given that HiSilicon is also a Huawei subsidiary. The Kirin 659 has been tweaked to perfection to sync up with the performance needs of Honor 7X. Navigation through the menus and the user interface was smooth, absent of any stutter or lag. The Honor 7X could handle most of the games I threw at it, namely Asphalt 8: Airborne, Modern Combat 5 and Clash Royale. All games ran flawlessly at maximum settings (although there isn’t much to tweak in Clash Royale). I’ve included the results of some benchmarks that I ran on the Honor 7X and how it fares compared to other devices. I was able to run two apps simultaneously in the split screen mode without any noticeable lag in either of the apps. Switching between the apps was instantaneous and both the running apps performed exactly how they would if ran separately. The rear-mounted fingerprint scanner was both accurate and precise and almost never failed to correctly identify my input.

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Moving on to the part that baffled me the most; the Bluetooth functionality of the Honor 7X. I’m going to go ahead and say that it is an absolute mess. I was forced to restart the device a few times after I attempted to switch Bluetooth on. At times, file transfers over Bluetooth would flat out fail, forcing me to use a third party file sharing software. I’m hoping that Huawei addresses this issue with an OTA update in the future. The disappointing Bluetooth performance was the only roadblock in my otherwise smooth Honor 7X experience. Other wireless data transfer means were much better, thankfully. The Wi-Fi radio managed to catch a strong signal where my other device got only one bar. I was hoping for a 5GHz Wi-Fi radio, but the Honor 7X is devoid of one. The Wi-Fi bridge functionality of the Honor 7X lets you share your device's Wi-Fi connection with up to 4 other clients, something that might come in handy if you desperately need an internet connection in a faraway corner of the room, away from the router.

The network reception of the Honor 7X was excellent, and I could get connectivity at locations where several devices failed to get any. The quality of audio over a VoLTE network was audibly better than that over a traditional 2G medium. The earpiece and loudspeaker were sufficiently loud and I could hear the caller even in a relatively loud environment. The throughput over mobile data hit up to 36Mbps at 4 AM in the morning, tested over two separate networks.

Honor 7X: Software & UI

The Honor 7X runs Android Nougat 7.0 out of the box, customized with Huawei’s in-house Android fork, Emotions UI (EMUI) 5.1. EMUI is easily one of the most feature-rich Android forks out there and it’ll almost make you forget that it takes up a whopping 12GB of the internal storage. No complaints, though. EMUI has the complete arsenal of tools a user would need to get day-to-day tasks done quickly. The included file manager is easy to use and helps you find the file you need without going through a dozen folders first. You can even create a password-protected folder for your sensitive data. Individual apps can be locked with a PIN/pattern/password using the App Lock feature. For the people constantly switching between identities, the App Clone feature lets you run two separate, independent instances of the same app.

EMUI 5.1 lets you choose if you want your all your apps scattered over the home screen or organized neatly in an app drawer (this feature was only added earlier this year after a lot of Indian users wanted a dedicated app drawer). The cache and memory management of the Honor 7X will ensure that no pesky background apps will hog your precious resources. The cache can be cleaned with the click of a button in the Phone Manager, and all background activity can be restricted to eke out a few extra ergs out of the battery. The inbuilt antivirus is all you’ll need to protect your device from malicious apps, and annoying “your phone software is outdated, click here to download totallynotavirus.apk to make your phone 700 percent faster, gain the ability to levitate and attain nirvana” popups.

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One of the features I loved about EMUI (and used extensively during this review) is the rolling screenshot feature. It lets you capture an entire webpage by automatically scrolling and capturing the contents on a real-time basis and stitching in into one image. The screen recording function is also neat, allowing you to easily make a video showing your mom how to disable media downloads on WhatsApp. As mentioned earlier, EMUI 5.1 has a one-handed mode, which will come in handy (geddit? geddit?) for people with small hands. The mode can be toggled by dragging the home button to the recent apps button. A “Floating Dock” is also included, which emulates the functionalities of the home/back/recent apps keys and can be placed at any location you choose. You can even clean the device cache using the Floating Dock, to get that little extra punch. The Honor 7X comes with pre-installed games, which you can try for all of ten minutes before being prompted to buy them. I promptly uninstalled the games, obviously.

Honor 7X: Battery Life

The Honor 7X’s 3,340mAh Li-Po battery might not seem like a lot on paper compared to the 4,000mAh units we’re used to seeing in other similarly priced devices, but I managed to get a lot more out of it than I expected. I could squeeze out a day and a half worth of performance out of it with about 5 hours of screen time with auto brightness switched on. On full brightness, I got around 4 hours of screen time and 20 hours of operation. Another neat feature in the Honor 7X is the “Ultra Power Saving” mode, which shuts off all background activity and lets you run only the dialer, emergency button, contacts, messaging and two apps of your choosing. Sadly, screenshots (and most of the other functionalities) are disabled in the mode, so I can’t show you how it looks. The excellent battery life can also be attributed to the excellent software optimization and just how well EMUI 5.1 works to get the most out of it.

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Honor 7X: Verdict

Of all the devices I’ve reviewed so far, the Honor 7X is by far the best one I’ve laid my hands on. I’ve already recommended the Honor 7X to several people looking to buy a new phone as I can personally vouch for its performance. At a retail price of Rs.12,999, The Honor 7X offers excellent value for money. I’d recommend getting yours quickly as the Honor 7X is expected to disappear off the shelves much like its predecessor, the Honor 6X. The device will be available exclusively via flash sale, so keep an eye out on our website so that stay up to date with the sales. The Honor 7X is a testament to the technological prowess of Huawei and a good indication of why they're one of the best smartphone manufacturers in the world.