Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has finally unveiled its latest budget warrior, the Honor 7X, for the Indian market. The smartphone comes with a price tag of Rs 12,999 for the 32GB storage variant, while the 64GB storage variant is priced at Rs 15,999 and it will be available from Amazon India from December 7, 2017.
The smartphone brings a lot of goodies at an affordable price tag. Whether be it the new 18:9 aspect ratio or the dual-camera setup, the smartphone can be certainly seen an interesting proposition at this price range. But, will it be able to give a stiff competition to its arch-rivals in terms of performance and more? Let’s find out.
What is interesting in Honor 7X!
Honor has been known for making some sleek and gorgeous looking smartphones in the past and Honor 7X is no different. The smartphone can be considered as one of the sleekest smartphone available in the market, especially, at this price range. Those slim bezels and the tall display makes it look like a much more premium device than the price suggests. The metal unibody definitely looks slick and it is really comfortable to hold as well. That being said, the phone is certainly a bit slippery in nature, so a protective case is a must with this one.
Coming to one of the major highlights of the smartphone, the Honor 7X features a 5.93-inch Full HD+ display with a screen Resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels. The display follows the latest trend of 18:9 aspect ratio and just like the Honor 9i, this one also checks certain boxes in this department as well. The display comes loaded with some good viewing angles and text looks pretty sharp in this as well. You will certainly enjoy watching movies or video on this device due to the tall aspect ratio. The outdoor visibility is not that great, but for indoor conditions, it does a pretty good job.
Moving to the camera performance, the phone features a 16-megapixel primary sensor with LED Flash, PDAF, and a secondary 2-megapixel sensor. On its front lies an 8-megapixel camera for selfies and video calls. Honor has really excelled in the camera department and it is reflected in this phone as well. The camera does a pretty good job in the broad daylight condition as the photos came out to be sharp and close to the source. The selfie camera does a decent job in the broad daylight condition as well and you get that natural-looking photos. The camera does sports some interesting modes which are fun to use. Overall, the phone comes with some interesting camera performance as well.
Coming to the performance, the Honor 7X does a pretty decent job considering the price point. The smartphone handles most of the tasks you throw at it with an ease and yes you can thank the 4GB RAM for it. We faced no issue under normal usage and multi-tasking was smooth as well. On the gaming front, the phone handles most of the casual gaming like Age of Ottoman, Flippy Knife and more without any hiccups and when it comes to graphic-intense games like Into The Dead 2, God of Rome, Asphalt 8: Airborne and Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade, it does not disappoint either.
Just like the Honor 9i, this one also comes loaded with the EMUI 5.1 based on Android Nougat. With this the latest user interface, you get an option to choose between a standard layout and an App drawer, which is a welcome move as it helps users in deciding their preferences. Apart from this, there is an option to resize the apps, which are not optimized for the new 18:9 display, but, in some cases, you will find it a bit zoomed in view with sides getting cropped. One can also shrink the display by swiping across the navigation buttons.
There are also some smart assistance features including floating dock, motion control, one-handed UI, voice control and more. The floating dock is particularly useful for such a large-screen device and it comes with different shortcuts like all navigation controls, lock screen, and cleaner.
What is not interesting in Honor 7X!
Coming to the flaws in Honor 7X, the first one is the display itself. We agreed that this is particularly a new trend in the smartphone market, but still sporting such a large display, does hamper the reachability factor. This simply means that it becomes difficult to reach the corners of the display with one hand. One can shrink the display, but most of the time you will not use it. Secondly, the app rescaling does stretch it and sometimes it makes it a difficult thing to use certain apps.
Another downside of the Honor 7X is the battery department. The phone manages to last almost day under normal usage. However, under power usage, the device last half a day with multiple apps running in the background, playing graphic-intense games and more. Further, there is no option of Fast charging and it does take a noticeable amount of time to get fully loaded up. However, there are some options to increase the battery mode, by closing power-intensive apps and lowering the resolution to save some juice.
Although the camera does a pretty decent job in broad daylight, the low light performance is pretty much average at this price range. In multiple low light or indoor shots, we found that the pictures were not that sharp and photos were prone to graininess. The bokeh effect also does a good job in highlighting the subject as the algorithm does not crave the subject precisely. Well, Honor did raise some bars with the Honor 9i, but it seems the Honor 7X does fall a little short on it.
Lastly, coming to the user interface, it still runs on an older version of Android and yes we noticed some lags in the UI this time. You will notice a split second lag when you are switching between different applications or games. Well, this could be fixed with (hopefully) a software update.