Gadgetory

the mid ranger phone market is really hot this year at Aoife while we took the wraps off a pair of wallet friendly phones and since I have smaller hands I'll be reviewing the smaller offering I'm Juan Carlos bag Nell for Pocket now and here's our full review of the huawei Nova first a little housekeeping we've got a 5-inch 1080p LCD powered by a new mid-range chipset look welcome 6 2 5 3 gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage with 8 dual SIM card tray that can accept microSD cards to expand that storage an 8 megapixel selfie camera adorns the front face with a 12 megapixel rear camera on the back capable of shooting UHD video a 3000 20 milliamp hour battery is a respectable size for a smaller mid-range ur and USB type-c should be expected on all new phones moving forward these days proof getting the specs out of the way this screen size is pretty terrific for folks with smaller hands or people wanting a better one-handed experience some might complain about the rear mounted fingerprint sensor when the phone is on a table but using the Nova on-the-go you rarely have to dance the phone around in your hand to fully navigate the user interface though this LCD is a bit dim unfortunately landing just ahead of the LG g5 and just behind the honor 8 it's right at that threshold where it's bright enough to see what you're doing went outdoors but this is not a sunlight busting champ the Nova borrows a number of design cues from previous Huawei devices rounding the corners in sculpting the back like the g8 including the cutout around the camera like the p9 and chamfering the edges to play with light this is a clean look for Huawei which takes a small step away from some of the previous Apple and HTC inspired designs and it develops a more cohesive brand look alongside products like the media pad m3 what's odd is seeing the larger Nova plus alter that look because of the bigger camera bulge and of course we have huawei's custom launcher pre-installed emui takes familiar Android design elements like the app drawer and throws them out the window for an overall user interface more closely related to iOS mixing widgets and apps shortcuts can look really cluttered which is why Apple doesn't do this we've covered a you I in greater detail and past reviews but for folks who don't enjoy this layout installing Google now launcher or nova launcher on your nova can get you most of the way back to something more familiar moving over to performance the Nova is packing a Qualcomm six to five chip set and it's the first time we've reviewed a phone using the silicon the numbering for the CPU is spot-on as the Nova performs somewhere between the Huawei GX 8 which used a Qualcomm 615 and phones like the Alcatel idol 4s which use a Qualcomm 6 v 2 this is about as middle-of-the-road as you can be in the middle of mid pack performers this chipset does arrive with a few tricks however a smaller manufacturing process helps it run cooler and this phone didn't heat up radically while installing our normal collection of apps the 625 also supports UHD video recording which we'll talk about more in the next section on the camera using the phone in real-world situations it definitely feels a step behind devices with more powerful Hardware basic navigation is handled well but after using an honor 8 for so long the difference is in applo ting time multitasking and gaming are noticeable and let's talk about this camera playing with the smaller of the nova siblings we're swapping hardware image stabilization for larger pixels and the results aren't bad we don't have the same semi-professional focus on controls here with more of a point-and-shoot approach to this camera app unsurprisingly similar to what apple offers on the iPhone on the whole we get nice shots out of the setup white balance tends to land a bit on the warm side and we definitely see a tendency towards over saturation but images should satisfy most consumers shopping near this price point though the Nova just isn't the kind of budget camera champ we might find on a 1 plus 3 or it's cousin the honor 8 we are working on early software - as about one out of 20 HDR shots just completely jumped the rails like this one here now getting dark all phones could benefit from image stabilization in low-light situations but the Nova performs better here than we thought it would pushing the phone to its limits on this snail shot we managed to land focus and expose an image in almost no light it's a terrible shot and you would definitely just want to throw your flash but the phone still managed to produce something which was in some way shape or form I identify Balazs it's nail now what's interesting about the shooter is seeing a 600 series qualcomm chipset capable of UHD video which doesn't overheat as easily as the Alcatel or sony phones we've reviewed nova produced a crisp image with around a 40 megabits per second bitrate but no hardware image stabilization means every shot is going to be twitchy even when you're trying to hold still though scaling back to 1080p we get an absolutely terrific software stabilization so there is an option to prevent seasick video I trip right about here and the camera barely flinched moving over to audio the speaker on tap is thankfully louder than phone's like the honor rate though the output is a touch airy or hissy at max volume a can hold on to some aggressively loud music tracks with little distortion but the highs will sound brittle or shrill not bad for alerts not great for music headphone audio unfortunately is a lowest-common-denominator solution it's functional but this is a woefully weak amp and the nova posts DAC quality numbers more in keeping with lower budget options in checking out the radios unfortunately the Nova didn't fully support et LTE so we couldn't get a great handle on that radio reception over HSPA calls were clear and connection was strong around my neighborhood surprisingly Wi-Fi performance was very strong for a metal backbone in this price tear staying connected to my router at greater distances than most flagships we've reviewed the flipside to this however is that our review unit doesn't seem to support five gigahertz we can only see 2.4 gig signals when trying to connect and lastly looking at battery life we were hopeful that this revised processor would prove to be a battery champ thanks to a die shrink which helps the phone run cooler but this has to be balanced against the display now testing at 190 lux we picked that number because it was close to 50% output on the galaxy s7 this means the backlight on the Nova is working at close to three-quarters of its peak output running our media test streaming 30 minutes of HD video over Wi-Fi at 190 Lux the Nova did well draining only 5% of its battery and these numbers are right in line with phones like the galaxy s7 easily vesting devices using the less power efficient Qualcomm 650 chipsets in charging the phone however Huawei doesn't list a specific quick charging specification and recharge numbers our average after 1/2 hour on a charger we only saw a 27% recharge so let's wrap this up where does that leave us with the Huawei Nova there are just so many conflicting emotions the $400 market is crazy competitive right now we just shot another video roundup on all of the great options at this price point so Western pricing for the Nova will be crucial the announced price of 399 euro doesn't instill us with a lot of confidence if this phone lands unlocked around 380 dollars attractive design can't make up the performance difference against a phone like the honor 8 which would only cost about 20 dollars more and is arguably even more attractive however this phone is near perfectly built to do battle against the new Moto G 4 + nearly spec 4 spec it easily handles Moto's current budget champ a small premium price bump would certainly make sense given what this phone can do but carving into that hundred dollar buffer between a moto and a 1 + 3 axon 7 or honor rate just makes the argument for ANOVA increasingly difficult I like the Nova a lot it's a terrific form factor and an attractive device but this is the most dangerous territory to launch a phone right now as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like these and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos bag nails i'm gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review