Honor 7

With its design and build quality, the Honor 7 truly defies its pricing and looks as good as super-premium flagships. Built entirely from metal, the unibody smartphone looks and feel exquisite. Though the choice of material makes it quite heavy (at 157g) for its size, it does offer a solid feel in hand. Moreover, the Honor 7’s compactness adds to its handling, since instead of following the phablet trend, the phone features a more manageable 5.2-inch display.

The Honor 7 sports a 5.2-inch IPS display which features full HD resolution. The colours look nice and the text also appears sharp on the screen. Viewing angles are decent as well, though the brightness levels aren’t as good, as even with max brightness, we struggled in reading the display under direct sunlight. In case the colour temperature offered by the display doesn’t suit your needs, then the device also gives you the ability to tweak it.

As aforesaid, the Honor 7 sports a button on its left spine, and you must be wondering about its purpose. Well, Honor has christened it the Smart Key, and has made it entirely configurable for various actions depending upon how you press it. You can open different apps or run some frequently-needed tasks such as starting the voice recorder or switching on the flashlight with this button.

While there are uncountable number of customisations running on top of Google’s Android platform, there are a very select few which has impressed us. Huawei’s Emotion UI is certainly ranks among them, and it has only became better in its v3.1, which is based on Android v5.0 Lollipop.

In terms of hardware, the Honor 7 packs top-of-line camera sensors, both at the back as well as the front. Not just the primary snapper, but the selfie shooter is also complemented by an LED flash, though at the back, the phone gets a dual-colour module.

Like most flagships from Honor, the 7 relies on Huawei’s own Kirin processor for delivering a smooth performance. The octa-core chipset powering the handset is made of two quad-core clusters clocked at 2.2GHz and 1.5GHz respectively. The CPU also offers a Mali-T628 GPU, which helps in smooth rendering of graphics while playing games. The 3 gigs of RAM ensures that the phone doesn’t slow down even when you are running multiple apps. The hardware is capable of handling all your needs, be it while basic navigation, browsing heavy websites or even playing graphics-heavy games. We simply loved playing titles like Dead Effect 2 for long durations.

The 3,100mAh battery fuelling the Honor 7 doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with the usage. Charged 100 percent at 8 in the morning, it barely manages to last till night with moderate use of calls, internet browsing and gaming. In case you use it extensively, then it might give up in the middle of the day, since even with 15 minutes of gaming, the battery juice drops by 6 to 7 percent. To get a relative idea of how the device fares against the competition, we put it through our battery drain test, wherein we play an HD video on loop with both the brightness and volume set at 50 percent. The Honor 7 was able to play the video continuously for 8hours and 30 minutes, which is just about average.