Review of the HONOR 8A smartphone. State employee for every day. | Smartphones | Reviews | DNS Club

⇡#hardware and performance

It’s easy to guess the technical content of Huawei smartphones and tablets in advance. This is how we reasoned in the case of Honor 7. The processor most likely will be a chip from a subsidiary of HiSilicon. Since the smartphone is intended for demanding young people, Huawei will most likely install the most powerful available solution in it — the eight-core Kirin 935 chip.

That’s how it actually happened. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that even the fashionable Huawei P8 has the Kirin 930 installed. However, the difference between them is not very significant: the frequency of the Cortex-A53e cores is 2 GHz and 2.2 GHz, but the Cortex-A53 cores operate at the same frequency — 1.5 GHz. However, the very fact that Honor 7 has a more powerful system-on-chip is surprising.

General synthetic tests — AnTuTu Benchmark 5 and GeekBench 3 — clearly demonstrated the superiority of Honor 7 over Huawei P8: the new product is really more powerful. For example, in the AnTuTu task, “seven” scored more than 49 thousand points, while P8 scored less than 44 thousand points. At the same time, even the most powerful, 935th “Kirin” is significantly slower than the new monster from MediaTek (Helio X10 MT6795T, which runs HTC One M9).

Huawei P8 and Honor 7 have three gigabytes of RAM. Of course, fast LPDDR3 modules are used. The built-in storage capacity of the S7 test unit is sixteen gigabytes, of which less than eleven are available to the user. There are 32 and 64 GB versions for different markets, but whether they will be officially sold in Russia is not known. The user can install a microSD memory card instead of a second SIM card; there is no separate slot for a flash drive.

When performing everyday, mundane tasks, the Honor 7 performs well. Literally a couple of times during testing, it barely noticeably froze — let’s hope that this is a flaw in our pre-production sample.

The graphics controller in the Kirin 935 is the same as in the 930, and in the 925, and in the 920 – ARM Mali-T628 MP4, operating at 600 MHz. This solution, as you probably already guessed, is far from the first freshness. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that resource-intensive 3D toys on the Honor 7 are somewhat slow.

⇡#appearance, ergonomics, fingerprint scanner

Huawei engineers have finally made the body of the next Honor series smartphone metal. And this, in general, is a significant event — previously the cases of gadgets of this family were plastic. This is where the good news regarding appearance probably ends and the ordinary news begins. The fact is that Honor 7 looks, to put it more precisely, mediocre — it can easily get lost among other Android smartphones.

Huawei Honor 7 – front panel

The dimensions of the gadget are also quite standard, as is the weight — 157 grams. Your hands don’t get tired of it, even if you hold the device suspended for a long time. The thickness of the case is 8.5 millimeters. Most competitors are thinner. On the one hand, this does not seem to be very good for our test subject, but on the other hand, a fairly capacious battery of 11.78 Wh (3100 mAh, 3.8 V) fits in its body, so this thickness is justified .

Huawei Honor 7 – front panel

There are no hardware keys on the front panel — the operating system navigation buttons are virtual. At the top of the panel there is a slot for the earpiece, the sensitive area of ​​the light sensor and the lens of the front eight-megapixel camera.

Huawei Honor 7 – front panel

Another interesting feature in the exterior of Honor 7 is the “smart” key. This is a hardware button located on the left side, under the middle finger of the right hand. The key is programmable; the user can assign an action to it (activate the camera, turn on the flash, launch the voice recorder, etc.) or launch an application.

Huawei Honor 7 – “smart ” key

Next to this very “smart” key there is a slot for installing two cards – Nano-SIM and a combined slot for Nano-SIM/microSD. Unfortunately, the smartphone, like many other Huawei devices, does not have a separate slot for a memory card.

Huawei Honor 7 – left side

The layout of the controls and connectors on the smartphone is standard. The power and volume keys are located on the right side. On the top edge there is an IR port and a 3.5 mm audio jack, and on the bottom there is a Micro-USB interface and an external speaker. The latter is not blocked by your hand, even if you hold the gadget horizontally.

Huawei Honor 7 – side ends

Another little surprise awaits on the back panel. Under the lens of the main 20-megapixel camera there is a biometric sensor, which was not previously available in Honor. But something similar was in the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 smartphone, released a year ago.

Huawei Honor 7 – fingerprint scanner

It is noteworthy that with its help you can not only unlock the device, but also answer calls, turn off the alarm, view the list of open applications (to do this, you need to swipe up on the sensor), open the notification panel (swipe down ) and erase notifications (double tapping on the sensor).

Moreover, the user can create a protected area for storing confidential information and classified applications, access to which will be carried out using a fingerprint — through a special section in the built-in file manager. The fingerprint sensor works quite quickly and, most importantly, accurately — on the official Huawei website it says 0.5 seconds for recognition, and this seems to be true.

Huawei Honor 7 – biometric sensor parameters

The main camera lens protrudes somewhat from the body, which is not aesthetically pleasing. However, this does not cause any inconvenience: it will not be scratched, even if the device is lying on the table with its back down — there is a metal edging around the protective glass. Next to the camera is a two-section LED flash. We had no complaints about the assembly — the device does not creak or bend, although it does not leave the feeling of an expensive thing either.

Huawei Honor 7 – back panel

⇡#display

The display characteristics of the Honor 7 are in many ways similar to the display characteristics of the Huawei P8. In particular, they have the same screen diagonals and resolution — both gadgets have 5.2-inch Full HD displays. They have the same pixel density, 423.6 inches. This is a fairly high value — the picture on the screens looks sharp.

Huawei Honor 7 – fragment of screen photo without compression

Huawei has not yet installed a Quad HD display (2560 × 1440) in any of its devices — neither in the technologically advanced Honor 7, nor in the fashionable P8. A matrix with this resolution is already used by all the major players in the Android smartphone market — both LG (G3, G4) and Samsung (S6/S6 Edge)

The display installed in Honor 7 is made using IPS (in-plane switching) technology. Its viewing angles are quite wide — it’s quite comfortable to watch, say, movies and photos on the display together. There are no serious color deviations or shifts, or significant drops in contrast when looking away from the perpendicular.

Huawei Honor 7 – display settings

The protective glass of the front panel has an oleophobic coating, so it’s pleasant to touch the screen of the “seven”. During operation, it practically does not get dirty: even if the user left “fingers” on the display, it is not difficult to get rid of them using any cloth at hand. The Honor 7 screen is made using One Glass Solution (OGS) technology, that is, there is no air gap between the protective glass and the matrix, which reduces the number of reflections. A very effective polarizing filter also helps combat glare.

The backlight boundaries of the Honor 7 display are quite wide: the luminosity of the white field varies from 12 to 438 cd/m2. These brightness values ​​allow you to comfortably use the device both in complete darkness and in the sun. The gadget is equipped with a light sensor, thanks to which it can independently adjust the brightness level that is comfortable for working in given conditions. The sensor works quite correctly.

The luminosity of the black field is small: at maximum brightness it reaches 0.33 cd/m2. This is a good indicator for an IPS matrix — the black color looks quite deep at any brightness, including maximum, without deviations into dark gray, dark purple or some other dark color. The contrast of the Honor 7 display is very good by the standards of mobile IPS – 1327:1.

Huawei Honor 7 – grayscale color temperature

The color temperature of shades of gray is slightly higher than the reference value of 6500 K — on average it is 7500 K. Evenness is also not all smooth — very light and very dark tones are colder than the intermediate ones, and in general the picture is a little cold. If desired, the user can correct this in the display settings menu.

Huawei Honor 7 – gamma curve of gray color (left) and color components (right) in comparison with the reference curve (indicated by dotted line)

All gamma curves coincide with the reference curve — the smartphone display displays various halftones and shades correctly. That is, everything is fine with the display, except that the color temperature is too high — we have no other comments.

⇡#technical specifications

* There is a version of Huawei Honor 6 Plus without LTE support, but it is not officially supplied to Russia. It has strictly 16 GB of built-in flash memory, while the version with LTE support can be equipped with 16 or 32 GB of memory. Accordingly, when purchasing a version with 16 GB of flash memory, just in case, it is worth checking whether this copy has LTE support.

Honor 7 – information about the system and hardware according to the CPU-Z application