Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority now to e4 this year while we announced two new mid-range phones though Nova and the Nova plus now the Nova has a 5-inch display and the Nova plus has a 5.5 inch display now if you're after a smartphone that doesn't come with flagship pricing but still has a lot of interesting features and I think you're going to find these two phones quite interesting so let's talk about design for a moment normally when you have a handset that comes in a normal and a plus variant the two phones are really carbon copies of each other with the Plus version being just slightly bigger well that isn't the case with the Nova and the Nova plus well actually it is the case but not really let me show you in any way the two phones really are quite identical if you look at the construction they both have this same unibody metal construction if you look at the layout they're both almost identical you've got the volume rocker on the right-hand side along with the power button on the left-hand side you've got the SIM tray that can be dual SIM or one SIM and a micro SD card down at the bottom we've got the micro USB port along with a single speaker the Nova plus actually has two speaker grilles but only one of them has a speaker behind it you've got the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack at the top and the same kind of general feel when you look at them from the front or from the side however when you flip the phones over things actually look quite different the Nova had a round fingerprint button and a camera that's up towards the top toward one side on a white band but when you flip them Nova Plus over things are a bit different you have a square fingerprint reader and the camera is housed in the centre along with a camera bump because of the metal unibody both phones are easy to hold in the hand they feel sturdy and the build quality is really quite good so on the one hand these phones look very similar to each other on the other hand they don't in terms of display both have full HD IPS LCD panels one is of course five inches and the other is 5.5 inches that means the 5.5 inch one has a slightly lower pixel density however overall both displays look very nice there are good viewing angles and good colors in fact during the settings you can actually change the color temperature of the display on both devices however I found the default settings to be very nice when you put the two displays side-by-side they look very very similar and if I had to call between the two if I had to make a judgement I always say that the Nova plus has the slightly better display in terms of brightness both displays produce 415 it's of brightness and I've actually had really no problem at all using them indoors and outdoors with maybe just one exception if you've got bright midday sunshine shining directly down onto the device you might find it a little bit difficult to read but for 99 percent of the time it's absolutely fine now the internals of these two phones really is quite identical they both have the same amount of RAM they both have the same processor they both have the same features like fingerprint reader they both run the same software really the only big difference between the two is in the camera package and we'll talk about that in a moment but think about the internals you get three gigabytes of RAM which is really quite nice for a mid-range phone they could have put two gigabytes in there and it still would read of qualified as a mid range but they've gone with three which is really quite nice you also get 32 gigabytes of internal storage again they could have put in 16 but 32 is certainly a welcome addition here and you also get a micro SD card slot again something very much welcome both devices come with fingerprint readers and really while we have made some excellent fingerprint readers in their recent devices including the mate 8 and the huawei p9 and p9 plus and these two devices carry on that tradition the fingerprint reader is fast and it's accurate I've had no trouble using it whatsoever I also like the fact you can unlock your phone and wake it just by putting your finger on the on the fingerprint reader and instantly it's ready for you to use additional features for the fingerprint reader including swiping through the gallery and taking photos so the huawei software certainly make full use of the fingerprint reader now when it comes to the processor this is really where we see the mid-tier specifications of this phone you're not going to see a flagship processor here in fact what we have is an octa-core 64-bit processor from Qualcomm the Qualcomm Snapdragon six to five now the six to five uses eight cortex a53 cores from arm now the court is a 53 core is a brilliant core in terms of power efficiency however it's not got as great performance as some of other of ARM cores like the a 57 the a 72 and the a 73 so it's definitely down the lower end of the performance range however great on performance and that's reflected in the battery life which we'll talk about in a moment however the 625 does have a couple of tricks up its sleeve first of all it comes with an Adreno 506 GPU which supports open GL es 3 point 1 so it's an advanced GPU but maybe not the fastest secondly it's also built using a 14 nanometer process now the 40 nanometer process is the same process that the leading flagship processes are built on today so you get the best in terms of efficiency power efficiency and the best in terms of speed in fact the cause in this phone all clocked at 2 gigahertz which is really quite nice and that means the overall performance is actually very very good for day to day use for email video web browsing social media taking photos all that kind of stuff you have seen no problem with this device at all in fact also because you've got three gigabytes of RAM the the multitasking also works very well you can even play 3d gaming on it without too much of a problem I test it with Riptide and with asphalt 8 airborne and they both ran absolutely fine now hardcore gamers will see that this is not a top quality GPU they'll see that there are maybe some drop frames and they'll still maybe want something else but if you're just a casual gamer you just want to get out a racing game where you're waiting for the bus where you just just do something really minor in 3d then it ain't going to be a problem it is just going to be perfect for you and the rest of the package in terms of social media and web browsing and email all that stuff is absolutely fine so it's not a flagship processor but actually it does have a low to offer in terms of audio both phones feature a single speaker on the bottom edge now like most smartphones that sound can be a bit tinny a bit screeching in the higher end however it's certainly very loud in fact too loud sometimes and you may find you get better sound quality if you've actually reduced the volume down a notch or two comparing the two phones side-by-side I'll definitely say the Nova plus has the better audio setup probably because it has a slightly larger chassis in terms of battery both devices come with larger than 3000 milliamp hour batteries and that's really quite impressive when you consider it phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 or the LG g5 have three thousand or less milliamp hour batteries in fact you Minova get three thousand and twenty milliamp hours and in the Nova class you get three thousand three hundred and forty milliamp hours now basically the Nova plus has a bigger battery because it has a bigger screen and it's really just to compensate for that bigger power needed to power that screen overall they both actually give you roughly the same kind of battery life and that battery life is quite impressive playing 3d games you'll be able to get at least five hours of gameplay from a single charge and that's pretty good because some phones don't even give you five hours on screen time just for doing simple tasks like browsing the web and this is for 3d games in fact when it comes to things like browsing the web or watching video you're going to get 10 or 11 hours of on-screen time using these devices and so if you mix that all up between playing 3d games social media web browsing email taking photos answering some calls then I reckon you get between seven and nine hours of on-screen time from every single charge and that's really enough to get you through an entire day without any problem whatsoever and actually depending on your usage you may even get two days of battery life out of this phone so it's a really good feature of these two devices talking about trees are also some great software features that help you extend the battery life for example there are some power saving modes including an ultra power saving mode which kicks in a monochrome user interface that can really extend that battery life when you're in a squeeze and you don't have where to plug your phone in now both phones come with Android 6.0 marshmallow with while weighs emotion UI on now the biggest difference about a while weighs in motion UI is the fact it has no app drawer so you'll have to organize your apps using folders on the home screens our person that's not a problem for me if it is a problem for you you can always install an alternative launcher now built into the software are lots of extra features that take advantage of things like the fingerprint reader you've also got motion gestures you've also got knuckle gestures that allows take things like screenshots by just double tapping on the screen with your knuckle there's a whole bunch of other features that while we have built in and you want to find out more about all those features do head over to the androids comm website where you'll find is written companion it tells you more about the software that comes with this device now as I said previously one area where we've seen this phone is really in the mid tier is because of the processor package another area is the camera setup now the Nova comes with a 12 megapixel camera and the Nova plus comes with a 16 megapixel camera now both cameras have a lot of good features for example they can both do 4k video the Nova plus for example also has optical image stabilization and the camera app that you get with both devices is excellent there are so many different features you can do in there but I really haven't got time to cover now but you've got HDR you've got panorama and there's a whole load of different effects like slo-mo and Knight trails and new beautification mode and it's really an excellent camera effect on both cameras there's even a full manual mode that even lets you do manual focus that's not something you see on every smartphone so there's a good load of things that are good positive about these cameras however when you start to take pictures they aren't quite up to high standards if everything is well if you're outdoors it's a nice sunny day you're going to get some good shot and they are really quite some good shots however as soon as you go indoors into lower light situations or using it artificial lighting then you'll start to see a lot of noise creeping into the pictures both phones also have a nice 8 megapixel front-facing camera which does actually produce some fairly good shots so there you have it the Nova and the Nova plus good full HD displays good viewing angles good color reproduction good internals 3 gigabytes of RAM 32 gigabytes of internal storage you've got the fingerprint readers on both phones got good to where you've got a lot of features including in that software that take advantage of the fingerprint reader and lots of other things like motion gestures and knuckle gestures however the processing package is a little weak and the cameras are as necessarily as good as you're gonna find in other mid-range devices well my name's Gary Sims from and royal authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also don't forget to subscribe to Andrew auratus YouTube channel you can follow me and your authority on social media don't forget download the Enduro thority app but last but not least don't forget to go to andrew authority comm because we are your source for all things Android