Huawei Honor 7 Launched With Full Metal Design

The Honor 7 is Huawei’s new flagship phone which is built on an evolution the Huawei Mate 7 successful design language. From a distance, the Honor 7 truly looks like a smaller version of the Mate 7, but its construction is all-metal and is equipped with the latest advancements in hardware and software from Huawei and is aimed at competing in the “affordable Premium” smartphone segment, according to Huawei.

The phone has a 5.2” 1080p (1920×1080 display) which features 423 PPI of pixel density. The LCD display is protected by a Gorilla Glass 3 high-strength glass.

The front design is extremely clean, and Huawei is not confident enough in its own brand that it has removed the Huawei logo from the front of the phone – this is a nice move! In the back, the Honor brand is put forward, and the Huawei logo has gone away. Honor is the brand that Huawei wants to promote. We had been told so in January of this year, and this is the concrete step towards this strategic decision.

The Honor 7 feels very solid and rigid in the hand. It is similar to holding an HTC phone like the M9 in terms of weight and rigidity. The phone weighs 157g and has dimensions of 143.2×71.9×8.5mm.

Thanks to our colleagues from Ubergizmo Germany, we have an Honor 7 hands-on video in which you can see the product design from up-close:

The phone is powered by a HiSilicon (a Huawei subsidiary) Kirin 935, which is more powerful clock-for-clock than the Kirin 925 used in the Huawei Mate 7 phone. This processor has 4+4 cores with four ARM A53e (2.2GHz) and four A53 cores (1.5GHz) that will work to optimize both peak power and sleep power, thanks to ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture.

There’s 3GB of RAM to help with handling multi-tasking, which was one of the weak points of the Mate 7, and the storage can be expanded to 128GB via a MicroSD card.

Of course, The Honor runs on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) but uses Huawei’s own user-interface called Huawei EMUI 3.1, or “Emotion UI”. It has a slightly different look than the original Android from Google, and features some app improvements and touches specific to Huawei such as a 1-click performance optimizer, better apps like the Clock, and other “daily life” improvements.

Huawei has upped the ante when it comes to camera paper-specs, with a 20 Megapixel camera (5252×3888 max photo-size) in the back, and an 8 Megapixel camera (3264×2448) in the front. Both can record 1080p 30FPS movies in MP47 format.

Users can connect to various networks, with GSM, EGSM, WCDMA, DCS, PCS, LTE FDD support of various bands (may vary depending on region), and there are TWO nano-SIM cards. Note that the SIM card #2 will have much more limited connectivity support (GSM, EGSM, DCS, PCS). As usual, WiFi AC (2.4 and 5GHz) is supported, along with Bluetooth 4.1, BT LE and A2DP Stereo BT for music streaming.

Finally, there’s a large battery of 3100 mAh (Li-Po) which, Huawei says translates into 350 hrs of stand-by time, or 8.3 hrs of talk time. It takes about 2 hours to charge it and the Honor 7 can be used as a battery to charge other phones (reverse-charge).

With a price of $349, the Huawei Honor 7 should be pretty competitive and we will come back to provide value/price analysis along with performance numbers. In the meantime, keep an eye out for our Review of the Honor 7, which is coming up shortly. This article is also available in Italian, and our French colleagues have shared their opinion on the matter as well (in French).

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: honor 7, Huawei