Huawei recently launched the brand new Nova series in India with the launch of Nova 3i and Nova 3 for Rs 20,999 and Rs 34,999 respectively. Although the Nova 3 will go on sale on August 23, it is Nova 3i that is available in India starting from today onwards on Amazon.
The latest smartphone from Huawei comes loaded with some interesting features like quad-camera setup, glass design and it is the first smartphone from the brand that is powered by the latest HiSilicon Kirin 710 processor. We have spent some time with the device and here are our first impressions of Huawei Nova 3i.
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Design and Display
Starting with the design, Nova 3 and Nova 3i shares a common design language. You get a glass body at the back and front in both of them. The difference can be found in the edges. Nova 3 has an ergonomic design (you can check the first impression of Nova 3 here) that seamlessly meets at the edges, while the Nova 3i has a flat back panel. The sides are made of metal, which adds an excellent grip to the smartphone. We got the black variant (Pictures) for review and it looks premium, although the back is prone to smudges.
The front comes with a fullscreen display with a notch that sits at the top. The notch is loaded with dual front-facing cameras and earpiece. The right bears volume controls and power on/off button, while the left houses Dual-SIM slot. The base comes with 3.5mm Audio Jack along with Micro USB port and a speaker grille, while the top is bare.
The back panel is equipped with vertically-aligned dual rear cameras along with LED flash situated at the top-left corner. There is a fingerprint sensor at the top-centre position as well. That said, the placements of buttons and camera are a tad similar to Nova 3, which in turns, is very similar to other Huawei and Honor smartphones available in India.
The Huawei Nova 3i comes loaded with a 6.3-inch Full HD+ display with a screen Resolution of 2340 x 1080 pixels. Once again, there is no difference in the display of both the devices. The display looks good and colour reproduction seems to be decent in initial testing. We will talk about in details during our upcoming review.
Hardware and Software
This is the first Huawei smartphone that is powered by the latest octa-core HiSilicon 710 chipset clocked at 2.2GHz. The phone is loaded with a 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 256GB via micro SD card slot. The latest processor is twice as powerful as the previous generation Kirin 659 processor. However, when compared to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 chipset, the Kirin 710 seems to lag behind with small margin. It is important to note the result is based on Benchmarking apps and the real world performance will be touched in our upcoming review.
On the software front, the Nova 3i features an Android 8.1 Oreo operating system, which is based on EMUI 8.2. The company has added a nifty feature of AI shopping in the Nova 3i. This basically scans an object in the camera mode and then shows you the product on Amazon. We will be discussing more the user interface in our detailed report. So, stay tuned with us for the in-depth review of the Huawei Nova 3.
Camera
In the camera department, you get dual rear and front cameras in this phone as well. The rear sports a 16-megapixel sensor with LED flash, f/1.8 aperture, PDAF and 2-megapixel sensor secondary sensor. For the front, it has dual cameras of 24-megapixel with f/2.0 Aperture and 2-megapixel sensors. The Huawei Nova 3i bears similar specifications for the front camera as compared to Nova 3.
The camera UI comes loaded with a host of interesting features and you also get AR lens, which is yet another rip-off of Apple’s Animojis. Apart from this, you get different modes like Pro, Slow-mo, Night, Panorama, Light painting, HDR, Time-lapse, Filter, watermark, artist mode among others. although it is too early to comment on the camera performance, the initial test reveals that the phone takes good shots when the lighting condition is ideal.
Battery and Connectivity
On the battery front, the Huawei Nova 3i features a 3340mAh battery with no support for quick charging. On the connectivity front, it supports Hybrid dual SIM slot (nano-SIM + nano SIM/microSD), Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2.4GHz/5GHz), Bluetooth 4.2 LE, Dual 4G VoLTE, GPS, and a micro USB port.