Honor 7X Review- A Worthy Value for Money Package!

Honor, the sub-brand of Huawei has been pretty active in India with some really good phones launched in the last couple of years including Honor 6X and Honor 9i and Honor 8 Pro. Now, the company has launched the latest sub 15k INR phone in India, the Honor 7X which is also the successor of popular Honor 6X. The Honor 7X has a lot of similarities with the recently launched Honor 9i (review) and comes with 5.93-inch Full HD+ resolution display. Honor smartphones have been known for great cameras, so how does the Honor 7X perform in the sub 15k INR price segment?  Let’s find out in the detailed Honor 7X review.

Design and Build:

Honor 7X is one of those phones with thin bezels and large displays. The phone comes with a large 5.93-inch display with 18:9 aspect ratio and this makes the device compact even though it has a large display. The design is quite similar to what we have seen on Honor 9i. It comes with curved edges and rounded corners. The dual cameras have a slightly different layout compared to 9i. While the 9i has a single unit with dual cameras, the 7X comes with 2 cameras mounted side by side along with antenna lines at the top. The cameras have a slight projection. The power and volume keys are on the right side while the SIM tray is on the left side. The bottom panel houses the micro USB charging slot, speaker unit, and the 3.5mm audio jack.

The fingerprint scanner is located below the rear camera. The front panel has the full view display and on-screen navigational buttons. On top of the display, you get the front 8MP camera, LED flash and the usual sensors. The build quality of the device is really good and matte finish rear panel. The Honor 7X feels like a solid well built a phone in this price segment.

Display:

The current trend in smartphones is the 18:9 full view display and the Honor 7X jumps into this segment with a 5.93-inch Full HD+ display with a resolution of 2160 X1080p and 18:9 aspect ratio. The display on the Honor 7X is vivid and has good color reproduction and is also sharp.We found that the brightness levels are a tad better than the 9i and feel good when using the device outdoors. The viewing angles are also quite decent, so is the touch response. The display has a 2.5D glass, but similar to Honor 6X there is no protection offered on the display. Overall, the display feels quite good in the segment, especially for multimedia consumption.

Software:

Honor 7X runs on Android 7.0 with EMUI 5.1. We have already covered some of the best features of EMUI 5.0. The new UI feels more polished and they have combined the notification center and quick toggles into a single block. EMUI 4.0 had a layout with multiple home screen devoid of an app drawer. But with EMUI 5.1, the company is providing an option of enabling app drawer. By default, this feature is not enabled, but you can go to Settings-> Home Screen style. The settings panel has also been redesigned to provide a better experience.

Since the navigational keys are on screen, you also get the option to customize the layout from the settings. With EMUI 5.1, you also get dual apps feature. With dual apps, you can run two instances of an app, which means you can run two instances of social apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. EMUI 5.1 brings in this feature and it is called App Twin.

Other additional features include motion control, floating dock, voice control and also gloves mode. It also features the themes app. The software also comes bundled with some Huawei apps like Torch, sound recorder, phone manager, etc. Overall, with EMUI 5.1, it feels a lot smoother and refined experience.

Performance:

Honor 7X is powered by the relatively new chipset, the Kirin 659 which is an octa-core chipset with a maximum clock speed of 2.3Ghz. It is coupled with Mali T830MP2 GPU and 4GB of RAM. The Kirin 659 is quite similar to the 655 found on the Honor 6X and is similar to Snapdragon 625 in terms of performance. The Honor 7X does a really good job in the day to day performance and it was responsive to almost all tasks it was put to and the app performance with EMUI 5.1 was really good. The memory management of the device was also really good and it was able to retain all apps in the memory without having to compromise on performance.

But the gaming performance of the device was above average and not class leading. While the Kirin 659 is a good processor, the GPU is not powerful for gaming. The heating wasn’t considerably high but 7X is not a device for heavy gaming. The call quality of the device was really good and no issues in signal reception but the speaker performance was quite decent and not the loudest in the segment.

The phone comes with dual SIM cards and a hybrid SD card slot. The phone offers 128GB (the unit which was provided to us). of internal storage and can also be expanded using SD card. In India, both the 32GB and 64GB variants are sold. Overall, the 7X did a good job except for the gaming abilities.

Camera:

Honor 7X comes with dual cameras on the rear panel similar to Honor 9i, in fact, it is the same camera unit. The rear camera is quite similar to Honor 6X and comes with a 16MP primary sensor and a 2MP secondary camera for depth sensing. On the front panel, you get an 8MP selfie camera. There is LED flash for the rear camera. The camera interface is the typical Honor interface with tons of features and plethora of modes to choose from.

Looking at the daylight captures taken with the device, there is good color quality as the images are punchy and vivid. There is also a good amount of detailing, but the sharpness levels could have been a tad better. Unlike the Honor 9i which tends to over saturates the images, the Honor 7X comes with overall good clarity and colors. Overall, the clarity of the photos taken in daylight conditions was good. The close-up images also turned out good and there is also the bokeh mode available on the phone which can take photos with a wide aperture. The low light imaging ability of the phone was average and while the company has managed to reduce the noise, the images aren’t bright. The selfie experience is good on Honor 7X with 8MP camera. You can also get bokeh on your selfies using software processing and hence they are not accurate. The video recording is also good but there is no 4K support on this phone. Here are some of the samples taken with this device.

Battery Life:

The Honor 7X comes with a 3340mAh battery but does not support any forms of fast charging. The battery life on the phone was quite good and we tested the performance and got around 5 hours to 6 hours of screen time on an average. While the performance of the battery is not stellar, it isn’t bad either. You can get 1.5 days of battery life on a moderate usage.

Verdict:

Priced at Rs 12,999, the Honor 7X offers a good package with 18:9 full view display, good cameras, feature rich EMUI and good performance. The Honor 7X also has some shortcomings like low light camera performance, no fast charging and also average gaming performance. But overall, considering the full view display, the Honor 7X is definitely one of the best you can pick below Rs 15,000 in India. The phone is available exclusively on Amazon.