Honor 7 review: Wait for the Honor 6X

Update: Honor 6X announced at CES

If you’re thinking of picking up an Honor 7 in the very near future, it may be best to hold that thought. At CES 2017, Huawei announced its Honor 6 successor and similarly priced mid-range smartphone; the Honor 6X.

While its all-metal design isn’t going to win any awards, for just £229 you get a Full HD 5.5in screen with an impressive dual camera and a Kirin 655 Octa-core processor with 4GB of RAM. While we’re yet to spend enough time with it for review (expected shortly), I can see the Honor 6X being a much better choice come the end of January.

That being said, you can find my original review below.

Honor 7 review

Ever since the OnePlus 2 arrived, competition between mid-range smartphones has been kicked into overdrive. The top-end specification and a price less than half of a traditional flagship means it puts other similarly-priced phones to shame. However, when this year’s best bargain is locked away behind a strict invite-only system, those without invites must look elsewhere for a better deal. Enter the Honor 7, the follow-up to last year’s great value Honor 6.

With a 5.2in Full HD screen, 20-megapixel camera and octa-core chipset, the Honor 7 has a pretty impressive feature list. It even has a rear fingerprint sensor, which is a pretty unusual addition for a mid-range handset. Located just below the rear camera, its square recess is the perfect height for your forefinger, and can open and unlock your phone from sleep mode in little more than a second, beating the OnePlus 2 to the punch in terms of overall speed.

The fingerprint sensor isn’t just for unlocking the phone, though, as it also returns to the home screen, takes photos and videos, answers calls and stops alarms. The latter can be a bit tricky to silence, particularly if you have the phone face up when it goes off, but I have to admit the rest of Honor’s additional functions are rather handy, particularly when it comes to answering calls.

Honor 7 review: Design & Display

However, while the Honor 7’s fingerprint sensor might increase the phone’s security, its overall build quality and sturdiness leave something to be desired. Despite having a tough aluminium unibody chassis, I found the front glass panel was very prone to getting scratched, and it even suffered some full-blown cracks during my short time with the handset.

This is a shame, as the 5.2in, 1,920×1,080-pixel panel is easily one of the most colour accurate I’ve seen in quite some time. With an sRGB colour gamut score of 98.8%, colours were very rich and vivid, and a black level of 0.3cd/m2 meant that text looked deep and inky. Likewise, a contrast ratio of 1,158:1 ensured there was plenty of detail in my various test images, and a high brightness of 482.28cd/m2 makes it easy to see outside.

Honor 7 review: Performance

Inside, the Honor 7 is powered by a 64-bit octa-core 2.2GHz Kirin 935 chipset and 3GB of RAM – the same chipset as Huawei’s flagship P8 – and it puts up a pretty decent fight against the top-end Qualcomm chips you’ll find in other Android smartphones. For instance, in Geekbench 3, the Honor 7 scored a respectable 923 in the single core test and 3,554 in the multicore test, putting it just behind the HTC One M9. It’s also significantly faster than the Motorola Moto X Play, which is more expensive than the Honor 7, so it comfortably one of the fastest smartphones you can buy in this price range.

Likewise, gaming performance was fantastic compared to other £250 handsets, as it managed 476 frames in the offscreen Manhatten test in GFX Bench GL. This equates to roughly 7.7fps, which might not sound great in practice, but it’s more than enough to run games like Hearthstone. Card animations were lovely and smooth, and I didn’t see any signs of stutter when the pop-up dialogue boxes appeared either.

Similarly, web browsing was also a cut above the competition, as its score of 1,075 in Peacekeeper puts it a long way ahead of the LG G4 and only a little way behind the Samsung Galaxy S6. I could see it in daily-use, too, as it coped very well with media-heavy pages like the Guardian, and showed very few signs of stutter even when there were embedded videos and lots of photos onscreen at the same time.  Continues on Page 2

Honor 7 review: Android 5.1 & Emotion UI

The only problem is that the Honor 7 uses Huawei’s Emotion UI 3.1 interface, which is possibly one of my least favourite versions of Android. Not only does it ditch the app tray in favour of crowded iOS-like home screens, but it also insists on separating your notifications from the menu shortcut button screen.

This is particularly irritating when all you want to do is go to the settings menu, as it automatically defaults to the notifications bar if you haven’t dismissed every last alert. Likewise, I’m not a big fan of the general look and feel of Emotion UI, as third-party apps just look badly designed alongside the bespoke rounded icons of Honor’s first-party apps, and none of the pre-installed themes are particularly appealing.

That said, Honor has gone to great lengths to make the Honor 7 easier to use than its previous handsets, as the phone has an additional Smart Key button on the side which can be assigned to perform up to three separate functions. With a single tap, double tap or long press, you can immediately launch any app of your choice, activate the camera or turn on the flashlight. It’s certainly more convenient than having to search through home screens every time I want to open Twitter, for example, but its small amount of tactile feedback can make it a little difficult to press at times.

^ The Honor 7’s Smart Key can be assigned up to three separate shortcuts

Less useful is Honor’s KnuckleSense technology. I saw this in Huawei’s P8, and it was a bizarre addition to say the least. This rather strange method of controlling your phone lets you take screenshots of whatever’s onscreen by using your knuckle, either with a double-tap for a full screenshot or by dragging your knuckle in whatever shape you like to crop an area of your choice which you can then share instantly with friends and family.

Honor’s also taken a leaf out of Nokia’s Z Launcher book by letting you draw out certain letters with your knuckle as well to launch certain applications. It only supports four letters – E, C, M and W – but they can be configured to open anything you like, from your internet browser to the camera. However, while it’s certainly one of the more novel ways I’ve seen to interact with your phone, I don’t find it particularly intuitive and pawing at your phone with your knuckle seems rather inelegant when the Smart Key does almost exactly the same thing.

^ Honor uses Huawei’s Emotion UI, which ditches the app tray in favour of a more iOS-like approach to Android

Honor 7 review: Battery Life

More disappointing was the Honor 7’s mediocre battery life. Despite having a large 3,100mAh battery, it lasted just 6h 28m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness, which is even worse than the Huawei P8, one of this year’s poorest battery life performers. This is very disappointing, and is easily the worst score I’ve seen this year. With such little staying power, it rather puts a bit of a dampener on the Honor 7’s reverse-charging feature, as this lets you use the phone to power other devices – once you’ve bought the dedicated cable, of course.

Honor 7 review: Camera

The 20-megapixel rear camera has phase-detection auto-focus. Honor says it can snap onto a subject in just 0.1 seconds, but whatever the figure, it certainly seemed to work extremely quickly when I tried it out for myself. There are also numerous several filters, including a Good Food mode, de-mist filter, and a time lapse video mode. Picture quality was good, too, as colours were bright and vibrant and each shot was very well-exposed.

^ The Honor 7’s rear camera captures plenty of detail, but noise levels are rather high

However, look a little closer and you’ll see quite a lot of noise and compression at the photo’s native resolution, particularly toward the edge of the frame. This can make photos appear grainy at times, particularly if there’s a lot of cloud present. Indoor photos weren’t much better in this respect either, as shadows were very dim, making any noise even more pronounced. It coped fine in bright lighting conditions, but switching off our external lamp made colours appear quite muted. In these circumstances, I’d recommend turning on the flash, as this helped bring back some much needed life into our still life arrangement.

^ Indoors, colours were very muted when our external lamp was turned off, but the flash does a good job of correcting this

On the front you’ll find an 8-megapixel camera with a 26mm wide angle lens for those all-important selfies. Detail levels were fairly reasonable, but those after true selfie perfection will want to play around with the Honor 7’s “perfect selfie” settings, which automatically applies your personalised beauty settings to every selfie you take. The results can be rather horrifying, especially when everything’s set to max, but it certainly saves time for selfie perfectionists.

Honor 7 review: Verdict

The Honor 7 has all the makings of a great mid-range smartphone, but concerns over its build quality, its frustrating version of Android and terrible battery life means it can’t help but fall short of its goals. At this price, the £270 Motorola Moto X Play is much better value if you can’t get hold of an invite for the OnePlus 2, but if you’d rather save some money, the £200 Sony Xperia M4 Aqua is an excellent alternative.