EE Harrier review

As last year’s Kestrel prepares to fly the coop, EE’s own-brand handsets now have a new pecking order for 2015. Ruling the roost is the £200 Harrier, but it’s also joined by the smaller £100 Harrier Mini. At a glance, both phones look almost identical: each has the same grey metallic finish and yellow highlight ring on the rear camera to give a bit of character, and both run vanilla Android 5.0.2, which makes a pleasant change from Huawei’s Emotion UI on the outgoing Kestrel.

Both have the power button on the left side, which is slightly awkward for right-handed users, but that’s where the similarities end. The 5.2in Harrier has a much more ambitious, high-end specification than its 4.7in brother. It not only has a higher resolution screen, but a faster processor, bigger battery, more storage and a better rear camera as well. It’s also a fraction slimmer, measuring 8.9mm compared to the Mini’s 9.5mm. It’s a small difference overall, but it does give the Harrier a slightly more upmarket feel compared to its shorter, chunkier sibling.

Display

One of the Harrier’s stand out features is its 5.2in 1,920×1,080 display. It’s not often we see this size or resolution on a £200 phone, as even our current mid-range favourite, the HTC Desire 820, only has a 1,280×720 resolution spread across a much larger 5.5in display. This gives the Harrier a massive pixel density of 424ppi, putting screen sharpness in the same ball park as some of this year’s flagships, such as the Sony Xperia Z3+.

It’s a shame that image quality doesn’t hit quite the same accuracy levels, but we were still reasonably impressed by an sRGB colour gamut score of 88.2%. This puts the Harrier roughly on par with Motorola’s 2nd Gen Moto G, and while red coverage was a little lacking, our test images still had plenty of punch.

Likewise, a contrast ratio of 900:1 ensured that plenty of detail was present at a variety of angles and a peak brightness of 383.17cd/m2 is just about high enough to see the screen clearly in bright sunshine. A high black level of 0.42cd/m2 had a tendency to lose detail in darker areas of images, but it’s certainly no worse than other £200 handsets we’ve tested recently.

Performance

Powered by an octa-core, 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor and 2GB of RAM, which is the same chip used by the £260 HTC Desire 820, the Harrier is much faster than its similarly priced competitors. In GeekBench 3, for example, its score of 642 in the single-core test and 2,361 in the multicore test puts it way out in front of the Moto G, which scored just 341 and 1,156 in the same test. This translated into faster app loading times and we didn’t have to wait so long for the Settings menu to open either.

Likewise, a score of 737 in FutureMark’s Peacekeeper browser test isn’t that far behind the LG G4, which scored 818. Indeed, the Harrier showed only a minimal amount of stutter as pages loaded up on complex news sites such as the Guardian. Otherwise, scrolling was smooth and lag free, and images loaded very promptly.

Graphics performance was decent, too. It might only produce 370 frames in GFX Bench GL’s incredibly demanding onscreen Manhattan test and 350 frames in the offscreen test, equating to about 5fps, but other phones like the HTC Desire 820 and Huawei P8 produced roughly the same scores. Likewise, a quick game of Blizzard’s Hearthstone showed the phone was more than capable of handling high-intensity games without too much judder.

Battery Life

The Harrier’s 2,500mAh battery doesn’t last as long as the Harrier Mini’s, but that’s partly down to it having to power a bigger, higher resolution screen. Still, lasting 10h 40m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to 170cd/m2 is impressive, and the Harrier Mini only lasted 13 more minutes under the same conditions. This compares well with other smartphones, beating both the HTC Desire 820 and One M9 by more than an hour.

As own-brand handsets go, we’re pleased to see EE keep the number of pre-installed apps to a minimum. The irritating fullscreen widgets can be removed, and everything you need as an EE customer is found inside the My EE app. This lets you check how much data, minutes and texts you have left each month, as well as top-up, buy add-ons and access the EE store. Likewise, EE’s recently launched Wi-Fi calling service, which lets you make and receive calls over Wi-Fi if your signal drops out, will be available to use directly from the dialler later this summer.

Camera

The Harrier’s 13-megapixel camera is pretty decent for a £200 phone. Colours could be a tad muted in our outdoor shots, but there was plenty of detail present and only large areas of sky showed any obvious signs of noise. Zooming in at full resolution revealed grainy textures and harsh edges, but this was a minor complaint overall. We wouldn’t recommend shooting in HDR, though, as this actually reduced the amount of detail by blurring finer areas of brickwork together, and shadows looked unnaturally bright.

^ Colours were a little lacking in vibrancy, but otherwise the EE Harrier produces very component photos

^ However, turning on HDR mode made images look unnatural and actually destroyed a lot of the finer detail

Indoors, the Harrier coped well when there was plenty of light present, but turning off our external lamp quickly made objects appear very blurry and riddled with extra noise. Turning on the flash helped slightly, but our white background still looked very grey and noise was present throughout.

^ Indoors, the Harrier produced similarly muted but perfectly acceptable shots when there was plenty of light available

^ Switching on the flash is a must for shooting in low-light, but expect colours to look relatively cool and grey

Conclusion

For £200 phone on Pay-As-You-Go, the EE Harrier is great value. It offers a lot more than the Moto G 2nd Gen for only £50 more, and you won’t find anything else faster for the money. Contracts are quite expensive, though, as the cheapest starts at £21.99-a-month for 500MB of 4G data, 500 minutes and unlimited texts. For only a few more pounds each month, for example, you can get a Samsung Galaxy S5, which trumps the Harrier in almost every way. The Harrier is a good buy on PAYG, but those looking for a contract should look elsewhere. Also check out our regularly-updated Best Smartphones and buying guide.