Honor, the brand backed by Huawei, has impressed us with its flagship smartphones at low prices. Its latest effort is the Honor 7 and here's our full review.
With a phone called the Honor 7 you might think the firm has been around for longer than Apple or Samsung which are both on '6' editions of handsets but the Honor 6 was the first smartphone we saw which was launched just over a year ago.
True to form, the Honor 7 is priced at a somewhat ridiculous £249 – the same price which theHonor 6 launched at. Incidentally, the old model is still available at just £209. You'll discover why we describe the price tag as ridiculous by the time you get to the end of the review.
Although it's a really affordable flagship phone, competition in this area has ramped up recently so it's not just Google's Nexus phones to outpace. In fact, the Nexus 5X is a fair amount more at £339. The Honor 7 has to fend off the likes of the OnePlus 2 which is just £239 and the Moto X Play which is £279.
The difficulty will be getting hold of an Honor 7 as it's been sold out on vMall for a while. Each batch has disappeared very quickly although we don't know how many have been made available. You can pre-order on Amazon if you're happy to wait until 9 November.
Although the Honor 7 looks somewhat similar to its predecessor, it actually looks more like the Huawei Mate S – mostly down to its metal rear cover.
It is a bit bigger than the Honor 6 so bear this in mind if you're thinking about upgrading. It's by no means the most svelte 5.2in phone on the market and it's more the 157g weight than the 8.5mm thickness that bothers us.
A plain appearance is on display at the front but the back is where all the style is found. The metal body looks like phones which cost twice the price, although we couldn't tell it has a 'ceramic blasted finish'. Strips at the top and bottom have a crosshatch texture which is unique while a shiny bevelled edge all the way around finishes things off nicely.
You may have noticed that a recessed fingerprint scanner sits below the camera and there's an additional button on the left side. We'll come to the fingerprint scanner in the hardware section but that so called 'smart button' can be customised to do what you want like open an app.
As mentioned, the Honor 7 has a 5.2in screen which is a small jump from the 5in display found on the Honor 6. The resolution remains at Full HD (1080x1920) though so pixel density does take a small dive to 424ppi. That said, the IPS screen looks nice and crisp with popping colours and decent brightness available should you need it.
Under the shiny exterior is a bump to a Kirin 935 processor which is still octa-core with the same Mali-T628 GPU but clock speeds are higher with half at 2.2GHz and the other half at 1.5GHz. A healthy 3GB of RAM is on offer and we've found performance of the Honor 7 to be delightfully smooth.
The benchmark results don't entirely reflect this, namely in the graphics department but we've not had any problems from a user perspective.
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