Honor 7A review: Good-looking budget phone, but there are some misses

Honor 7A review: Priced at Rs 8,999, Honor 7A offers dual rear cameras, Full View display, Face Unlock, and more. Here is our full review.

Huawei’s sub-brand Honor is looking to place it’s smartphones across various price categories in India. With Honor 7A and Honor 7C, the company has made its way into the budget smartphone segment, which is dominated by Xiaomi.

Honor 7A gets a 5.7-inch bezel less display, and a plastic body design. It supports two SIM cards and a microSD card. The SIM tray is on the left, while volume rocker keys along with power button is placed on the right. The phone used a Type 2.0 USB slot for charging, present at the bottom. A 3.5 mm headset jack is at the top. The phone runs Android 8.0 Oreo. Priced at Rs 8,999, Honor 7A offers dual rear cameras, Full View display, Face Unlock, and more. The phone directly competes with the Redmi 5 in India, which comes with a similar specs sheet. The 3GB RAM model of the phone costs Rs 8,999. We used Honor 7A for about two weeks and here is our full review:

Honor 7A specifications: 5.7-inch HD+ resolution (1440 x 720 pixels) | Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor | 3GB RAM + 32GB storage | 13MP+2MP rear camera | 8MP front camera with soft flash | 3000 mAh battery | Android Oreo 8.0 with EMUI 8

Honor 7A price in India: Rs 8,999

Honor 7A review: What’s good?

Honor 7A has a likeable design and it feels incredibly light, which is great. It sports a plastic back design, but thanks to a metal finish and metal frames, the phone looks premium given the asking price. A fingerprint scanner is present at the back cover – well within reach, while dual rear cameras are vertically placed on top left. Overall, the phone does not disappoint in terms of looks. It bears similarities with other devices in the price bracket, but that is not to say the phone looks any less stylish.

Honor 7A has a Full View display with thin bezels on top and bottom. The viewing angles are decent and the icons look good. I struggled to use the phone in bright outdoors, and the colours look washed out at times. The 18:9 aspect ratio display makes for a good viewing experience and adds to the style quotient.

Honor 7A is among the few phones, which offers dual rear cameras at Rs 9,000 price point. It includes a 13MP primary sensor and a 2MP lens for depth sensing. The secondary lens uses software to enable wide aperture and create bokeh effect in photos. The rear cameras do an above average job of clicking pictures when there’s ample light. The photos are detailed and the colours look decent. In low light, I had to really struggle with the focus to take good pictures. But again, this is a budget phone and it would be unfair to expect much.

The battery on Honor 7A lasts a day on light to moderate usage, which is great. I used the phone to watch videos, stream music, click photos, etc. The battery is comparable to a 3,300mAh one present on Redmi 5.

Honor 7A review: What’s not good?

Honor 7A is powered by the Snapdragon 425 processor. I faced several issues with performance, which includes app crashes, lag with multiple tabs opened, and delay in opening apps. I had to really struggle to use the phone with multiple tabs open, which is not acceptable at this price point. There was visible lag, and the PC Mark test crashed twice on the phone.

Honor 7A can’t handle graphics heavy games such as Asphalt-8, but games like Candy Crush Saga are manageable. The phone also heats up really quickly, say within two to three minutes into tasks like games, videos or even video camera. The Face Unlock is not always accurate, especially in low-light. I’d recommend to stick with fingerprint scanner on this phone to quickly unlock it.