Last week, we were lucky enough to go to Huawei’s UK HQ in Reading to get our hands on the brand new Honor 7 Android smartphone. It’s no secret that I loved the Honor 6+ (hence why we have ads for it on our homepage), so I was more excited than most to see what the Honor sub-brand of Chinese mega-manufacturer Huawei have come up with.
And it’s looking like a beauty.
Our first impressions
Here’s me and the amazing Basil from Btekt talking through all the most interesting features of this phone:
The 5 coolest features in 3 minutes
A quick run-through of 5 of the coolest things you can do with the Honor 7:
- 5.2-inch full HD IPS screen (1920 x 1080, 424 pixels per inch)
- HiSilicon Kirin 935 chipset, 64-bit octa-core (up to 2.2GHz) CPU
- 16GB storage (expandable up to 128GB with microSD)
- 3GB RAM
- 3100mAh battery
- 20MP rear camera with sapphire lens cover & dual-toned flash
- 8MP front camera with soft light
- Runs Android 5.0 Lollipop with Huawei EMUI 3.1 over the top
- Fantasy Silver and Mystery Grey colourways (in the UK, at least - we’re not getting the gold one)
- Costs just £249.99 in the UK
As well as some pretty impressive specs for the price, the Honor 7 throws in a whole range of interesting extras. As we saw with the 6+, Honor are experts at providing a standout feature on a budget device - not something you often see in this price range.
On the Honor 7, there are lots of them: a hardware apps button; fingerprint sensor gestures; voice wakeup; camera modes including silky water, light painting and a food mode - there’s even a ‘demist’ filter for smoggier cities (you can tell this phone’s from China).
As with the Huawei P8, you can take a screenshot by double-tapping with your knuckle or using your knuckle to draw the area you want to snap - but in practice we found it quite tricky to get right.
We’re also pretty interested to try Perfect Selfie mode, which as well as the usual beauty-enhancing features in a solo selfie, also apparently recognises you in group photos and applies the changes you’d normally make to photos of yourself. Which is either amazing or bonkers, depending on your perspective.
We did get our hands on Food Mode, which works very well indeed:
Honor 7 camera samples
A couple of quick snaps taken outdoors on an overcast day:
Huawei Honor 7: UK price and availability
This phone will be just £249.99 SIM-free, which seems like an absolute bargain from what we’ve seen of it so far.
The phone is on sale now at Honor’s vMall outlet. As with the 6+, the Honor 7 will also be be available on Three, and SIM-free through Amazon UK from the 28th of August.
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