Gadgetory

huawei's newest mid-range smartphone adds a bit more of a luxurious look and feel and with while way designing one of the new Nexus phones maybe we'll get a glimpse of what they're planning for November hello everybody I'm crystal and this is a review of the Huawei honor 7 this year Huawei took a huge step up in the design department for their newest addition to their honor lineup with a ceramic coated single metallic body this song feels a lot more premium than last year's honor 6 when holding the honor 7 it feels very solid and nothing here feels cheap or clunky gone is a fragile real glass backing and here instead is a more durable metallic backing then not only looks great but feels really nice in the hand the front glass meets the metal edges without much of a lip allow you to swipe things in with ease now if it's pretty small bezels and 5.2 inch screen one-handed operation is quite easy even though the metallic backing can make it feel a bit slippery sometimes on the front above the screen we can find the 8 megapixel front facing camera the speaker grille which has an LED notification light inside and the front-facing flash well we'll get to that later the back of the phone offers a similar design to something like the HTC One m9 and is home to the 20 megapixel camera and it's dual tone flash right below the camera is a fingerprint scanner which although is unique placement it's a great idea as that's where you're pointing your usually arrest when holding the phone however this does mean that when the phone is sitting on a desk you'll have to revert to a pin code to unlock the device but the PIN pad is instantly accessible when turning on the screen this fingerprint scanner is probably one of the fastest I've used while way claims that the scanner can be your fingerprint and only 0.5 seconds and that's definitely right if not faster I found it faster than my Galaxy s6 and it very rarely failed to read my fingerprint and you don't have to turn on the screen for it to read it either the sensor is more than just a fingerprint scanner though as it supports swipe gestures which I actually found myself relying on when operating the phone to name a few sliding down can bring down the Norfolk in panel sliding up will show you your recent apps and just by tapping it it can be used as a back button these are very handy to have but like I said since the scanner is located where your pointer finger usually rests you will definitely accidentally trigger these gestures once in a while you can disable them if you like but I found most of these gestures useful enough that I try to get in a habit of not resting my finger there the top of the phone houses a headphone jack and IR blaster the bottom has a micro USB charging port and what looks like to be two speaker grills but the left one is the only one that plays the sound the speakers I would say are below average it gets loud enough so you can hear very well in a quiet room but move beyond that and you'll probably have some trouble trying to hear the quality also seems a bit muffled the volume buttons are located on the right side of the phone and they are very responsive and easy to press same goes for the power button which is located below it has a bit of a textured pattern to it although you can't really feel this but still it's very easy to differentiate between the volume buttons and power button as they are spaced apart just enough the left side has what looks like to be just a SIM card tray but it actually doubles as a micro SD card slot or you can have two SIM cards active below the tray is a button and now what is the purpose of this button well whatever you want you can launch apps using the button open up different commands and you can set up to three different shortcuts by either clicking the button once twice or holding it's just so useful I really wish more phones had this because it just makes multitasking and getting work done so much easier and faster it's a great feature the honor 7 packs a high silicon octa-core chiron processor with three gigs of RAM there's two storage models one with 16 gigs and the other with 64 gigs and inside we have a 3100 milliamp battery the phone comes in white black and even a gold option and yes it supports NFC the Huawei honor 7 is equipped with a 5.2 inch HD IPS display and it's a very nice one there's a huge difference between this and his competition the meizu mx4 the honor 7 has a beat by far with 424 pixels per inch viewing content on this display is great Huawei says the honor 7 display has a 1500 to one high contrast ratio and 85% color saturation rate this makes for crisp and clear text and very vibrant colors viewing angles are quite good and this screen can get very bright the phone also supports a tap to wake feature for easily turning on the screen with two taps overall it's a great display and you won't be disappointed by it the honor 7 is running 5.0 point 2 right out of the box with Huawei skinned of emotion UI or emui 3.1 there are some great things about it and some things that aren't that great what is great is that the phone is filled with shortcuts and little features that help navigating around the phone a lot quicker and fun besides the nice fingerprint scanner shortcuts you have the ability to use your knuckle to take screenshots by double tapping or even drawing areas to crop reversing the back and recent apps button or even adding a fourth button for notification pulldown there's even some silly ones like tilting the screen to move apps around there is no sign of any of Google's material design anywhere throughout the software what you actually have is something similar how iOS is if it's blurring of background areas it's all subjective some I love it but some Android lovers may wish it didn't steer too far off but hey whatever rules it follows or doesn't this UI is very sleek allowing for some different themes to be chosen with some really trippy but cool background animations once again we do have some more iOS inspired features like pulling up on the lockscreen brings up a control center with shortcuts for apps like flashlight and camera although there is no way to change these shortcuts and swiping down from the middle of the home screen will open a universal app search there is also no app drawer so once again this is a phone that you will have to resort to folder making to hide your apps also the recent apps screen is a little more reminiscent of android kitkat so users familiar with lollipop will have to get used to using this style of recent apps again the notification panel is chopped up into sections shortcuts and notifications it would have been nice to have these two sections combined but the notification section is quite nice with a little timeline on the left side keeping your notifications very organized although the UI design choices are unique is designed very well and the extra customization of shortcuts translates to a very nice experience the hardware does a pretty good job of making everything run very smooth very few times will it slow down or take a second to load something but when you move on to gaming the GPU doesn't do a great job of keeping up on more advanced graphical games it's not really bad but you do a lot of frames at times and menus will take a while to load more simple games like candy crush for example shouldn't be a problem but if you're a big gamer the honour 7 might not be the best choice the camera is a huge improvement coming from the Huawei honor 6 if it's 20 megapixels you can take some really good pictures Huawei is using a Sony sensor for their rear facing camera with a 2.0 aperture so low-light shots should be better and you'll have a nice depth of field effect launching the camera is extremely fast and easy to just by holding the volume down button the camera will launch and immediately snap a picture in a flash it's super fast and even while way seems proud of this as they fought how much time it took and yes picture quality is a great big improvement pictures have a good amount of detail and in most environments there is not much noise once you get into areas with medium light some grain will start to show but it's not too much I guess the theme for this camera is with lots of light you will take very colorful pictures with lots of detail and no noise as you begin to lower the brightness though these three things begin to drop so the closer you get to taking a picture in low-light pictures will start to get a little grainy and also colors begin to get a little dull but besides this the overall quality of pictures in low light is pretty good the front-facing camera is wide angled and 8 megapixels with a 2.4 aperture you have a couple of features here like beauty mode and even a front-facing flash which is more of a dim little flashlight but it can be good for just adding just a bit of extra light in the quality is great with nice colors and even detail and as you go into moderate to low light once again some noise will start to show but pictures are very sharp and good looking video quality is not that great dynamic range is pretty poor and a lot of the times it will be way to overexpose the honor seven houses a 3100 milliamp battery you can expect great battery life on this phone on a typical day of watching a few videos taking a few pictures responding to lots of text and having some long internet browsing sessions I was able to get around five and a half hours of screen on time the honor seven is also capable of quick charging which wow he claims in just thirty minutes can charge your phone from zero to fifty or with a five minute charge can power enough to have a one-hour phone call there are no huge flaws with the honor seven but if you're a huge gamer this film probably won't be the best choice and the UI will take some time getting used to but everybody will really enjoy the display on this phone along with the battery life and pretty nice camera overall it's a really good phone is it worth buying though well while we is going to be pricing this very competitively amongst other mid-range phones around $400 for that price point there are definitely better phones out there that offer more in some areas but at the end of the day this is a nice little phone thanks for watching everybody comment below and let me know your thoughts on the honor 7 also make sure you subscribe to hundred authority and don't forget to check out our website Android Authority comm because we are your source for all things Android