Honor 7C Review: Budget phone with a Dual camera shooter

You all might have read that Huawei is now, the world’s No.2 smartphone brand, after Samsung, according to sales figures. It overtook Apple with sales of 54.2 million units against Apple’s 41.3 million units. That’s a clear lead of 12.9 million units, with a growth of over 40%. The sales of Huawei also include the sales of the sub-brand Honor. It registered a growth of a whopping 150%. That means the Honor brand is gaining lots of sales with its budget and budget-flagship devices. In this review, we’re going through the Honor 7C, which is a budget-oriented device that comes with descent specs for a price that starts at Rs. 9999. Honor 7C is an Amazon exclusive device. You can get it through www.amazon.in for a price of Rs. 9999 for the 3GB/32GB variant and Rs. 12999 for the 4GB/64GB variant. The one I'm having here is the 3GB/32GB variant.

The specs of the phone are

5.99” HD+(1440x720) IPS LCD 18:9 display
3/4GB RAM
32/64GB Internal storage
Dual SIM (Nano) + Dedicated SD card slot (Up to 256 GB)
SD 450 SoC – 8xA53 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz
Adreno 506 GPU
13+2 MP (Depth Sensor) dual rear cameras
8 MP front camera with flash
3000 mAh Battery
Fingerprint/Face unlock
Android 8.0 Oreo with EMUI 8.0 on top
Dimensions – 158.3x76.7x7.8mm; 164g

So, let us get into the detailed review.

Design

The Honor 7C comes with a metal back and a 2.5D curved glass with curved corners and edges. The back panel is metal but I think the curves on the edges are plastic. With a thickness of 7.8mm and a weight of 164g, the phone feels good and a bit premium in hand. The back of the phone is clean with no antenna lines, a Honor branding and other information. The rear dual cameras are stacked horizontally with a single flash. The camera module protrudes a little, hardly noticeable, from the back. There is also a secondary microphone on the back near the camera module for noise cancellation. It’s available in 3 colour variants – Black, Blue and Gold. While the Black and Blue comes with a black front panel, the Gold one comes with a white front panel. The one I’m having is the Gold variant.

The phone is actually not a huge one, even though it has a 5.99” display. But, it’s a bit wide. Most of the people may find it difficult to use it with a single hand, but that’s what you get with the ~6" screen and 18:9 aspect ratio. I guess, to make it narrower, Honor could have gone with the 19:9 aspect ratio so that the phone can be made less wide. The build quality of the phone is really good. It feels premium and solid in hand. The fingerprint sensor is rear mounted and is at the ideal position. It is fast and accurate. It can also be used to lock apps, take a picture, drop the notification panel etc.

On the front, we can see the earpiece in the middle of the top bezel with the front shooter and proximity sensor on left and a front flash to the right. There is also a small notification LED on the left top of the front. We can also see the Honor branding on the bottom bezel or chin. On the right side of the phone, you have the volume rocker button and the power button. The buttons are well made and sturdy. The click of them feels really good. On the left, we have the Dual SIM+Micro SD card slot. What we get here is a dedicated slot for the Micro-SD card, and not a hybrid one which we can find in almost all the phones nowadays. The top edge of the phone is left unoccupied. On the bottom, there is the speaker, primary microphone, the micro-USB post and a 3.5mm headphone jack. I expected the headphone jack to be placed at the top, which I find more comfortable, but it’s in the bottom. I, personally, didn’t have any issues with it but it depends.

Display and UI

As mentioned before, the Honor 7C uses a 5.99” IPS LCD display with a resolution of HD+(1440x720 ~268ppi) and an aspect ratio of 18:9. The screen-to-body ratio is just above 76%. Like the 2018 phones, it’s a tall-looking phone with the long display. The phone has a slightly thick side bezel. The chin and forehead are also a bit thick. It’s like what you see in the Redmi Note 5, but the corners of the screen are not curved. The display has a slight red tint but I think most of the users won't be noticing it.

On paper, the display seems disappointing as it is of HD+ resolution, as other phones with the similar price tag offers a Full HD display. But, it is actually good. It is vibrant and crisp. Besides, the lower resolution helps in keeping the battery last long and the phone lag-free while playing games. The display has good viewing angles. What I felt about the brightness is that it’s bright enough but not that great for outdoor use. At the same time, the minimum brightness is good and comfortable in low-light use. The auto brightness feature works fine. Overall, the display is good despite having a lower resolution.
About the display, one more thing I would like to add is the colour reproduction is really high. The photos that I took with this phone, when viewed from other devices looked a bit under saturated.

Talking about UI, like other Honor phones, 7C has EMUI on top of the Android. The Android version we’re getting is 8.0 Oreo. On top of it, there is the EMUI 8.0. Having a custom skin maybe a problem for someone but I didn’t have any issues with this. EMUI actually looks good. You can enable the app drawer if you want or you can disable it so that apps get stacked in the home screens. I prefer to go with app drawer. You can also swipe down the home screen to get a search window where you can search the app you want. I find that feature really useful, which is also found in lots of other devices. There is a one-handed mode with which you can make the effective display smaller.

We have 2 options for navigation – 1. Navigation keys 2. Navigation dock. The former is the conventional thing that we all are used to while the Dock gives you ball on screen with which we can perform the navigation through the phone. With that, we get more screen real estate – for someone, that is important. I’m sticking on to the navigation keys.

(In the image on the right, there is no navigation dock or ball as when I take the screenshot, it's not capturing the dock. IDK why...)

There is an Eye Comfort mode which gives a yellow tint to the display. It’s actually good as it reduces blue light emissions and gives comfort to our eyes. We can use it according to our needs like turning it on for all the time or using it for a fixed time like in the night hours.

There is a face unlock feature through which we can unlock the phone with a glance. It’s fast but I don’t recommend using it if you wish to keep your phone secure. It uses the front camera to recognize the face of the user. It struggles a bit under low light conditions and is not as fast as the fingerprint scanner. I think the fingerprint scanner is more secure plus it is really fast. But, the face unlock is cool.

One thing I found here, which I don’t think anyone would be using is Smart Resolution feature in the Display menu. It says that “Automatically lower screen resolution to help save power”. It may sound good but I don’t know up to what extend it’ll be helpful as the native resolution of the screen is 720p. I haven’t tried it but I’ll update this if I find any considerable difference in the battery life.

There is also a Ride Mode which can be useful while long rides. What it actually does is if the user turns it on, whenever someone call, a voice note is played saying that "The person you're calling is riding a bike and cannot attend the call at the moment. Please press 1 if the call is urgent". The thing I noticed is when you're hearing this voice note, the call is connected. The caller can hear the noise of the wind or traffic or whatever. And if you press 1, the phone will start ringing and you can attend the call.

Camera

Camera is the department where the Honor 7C stands out from its rivals. It comes with a dual shooter – A 13MP f/2.2 Main sensor with PDAF + 2MP Depth sensor- on the rear. It performs OK in outdoor and indoor conditions. It’s a budget phone and you can’t expect the performance to be comparable to flagship phones. The photos taken looks good at first but when you zoom in, you can notice that it lacks details. The images are vivid but the quality is low. The camera is not so fast as it takes a moment to focus and the shutter response is a bit slow.

The camera UI is clean with everything we want on the screen. There are 2 modes – Wide Aperture and Beauty. Under Wide aperture, we can take bokeh shots and under Beauty mode, it’s same as always... The bokeh shots taken are not so good. The software actually struggles a bit to define the boundary of the subject and sometimes, it feels like a centre tilt shift. It makes me feel a bit whether this 2MP shooter is there just for the show but… IDK. With the wide aperture mode, we can adjust the aperture from f/1 to f/7, but f/3 or f/4 gives the best results. f/1 really feels like the background is smudged, instead of blur. And also, we can adjust the focus and blur after the photo is taken, from Gallery. As usual, there are different modes like Panorama, HDR, different filters etc.

The front shooter is an f/2.0 8MP one with a soft lit front flash. It’s of fixed focus. The flash is actually adjustable. It has 3 levels of brightness. The funny thing here is if we turn on the flash, the whole front panel of the phone gets lit. The photos taken by the front camera is good under outdoor conditions but indoor shots are not so good. There is a beauty mode, but I don’t think anyone will like it.

With both front and rear, we can record FHD videos at 30fps. There is no kind stabilization available.

The camera app doesn’t have a pro mode. I expected it to have one, since it comes with a dual camera so that it offers some kind of pro-experience; but it doesn’t.
As I told in the Display about the colour reproduction, don't expect the photo taken by this phone to be vibrant and saturated in other devices. The photos taken appear to be very vibrant and saturated, but it's only due to the display properties.

These are some sample shots

Here, I took this using the wide aperture mode. As you can see, the background blur is not so perfect. And also, the border detection of the subject is not accurate, even though it has straight borders. So, in the case of humans, expect things to be worse.

This are with the normal mode.

This is with HDR enabled.

Audio

The Honor 7C sports a single speaker at the bottom of the phone. The speaker is good. It’s loud but not so clear. It lacks clarity so that it’s better to use headphones while playing games and watching movies. And also, there is a Huawei Histen sound effects which deals with the equalizer and 3D audio, which is… I don’t think it’s something special.

The phone does not come with a headphone in the box. So, we have to buy a headphone. As told earlier, the phone comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack but it’s placed at the bottom of the phone which I, personally, don’t like. I like to have it on the top.

The earpiece is also good. The output is clear and loud but for some, the loudness won’t be enough.

Performance and Battery Life

Coming to this part, the Honor 7C has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 SoC under the hood coupled with a 3GB LPDDR3 RAM backed by a 3000mAh battery. SD450 is a processor that is aimed for a balance between battery life and performance. You can’t expect this phone to perform well under heavy loads but it’ll be enough for most users under this category. The phone was a bit laggy under heavy loads and multitasking. The temperature management is good as it didn’t get warm under these loads. The 3GB RAM is enough for this device but some users may require the 4GB variant, but I wouldn’t recommend to go for it considering the price and… the processor is the same.

The battery will last for a day under moderate use but that depends on individual users. The EMUI has some battery saving features and the one I found interesting is the Smart Resolution feature which lowers screen resolution when battery is low. I haven’t tried it for a long time. So, I won’t be able to say how effective is it in reducing the power consumption of the device. But, I guess it’ll help the phone to last for another hour or 2.

The charger that you get with the phone is a standard 5V/2A charger. It doesn’t say anywhere it supports fast charging. So, a user can check if it supports fast charging with a fast charger with the help of charge rate measuring apps like Ampere. I don’t think it’ll support fast charging. With the charger that you get, it’ll take about 2.5 hrs to charge the phone from 0 to 100%.

Storage, Connectivity and Sensors

The Honor 7C supports dual SIM cards, but there is no true dual 4G support. It comes with a dedicated slot for a MicroSD card. So, we don’t have to choose between a SIM card and an SD card. Both the SIMs are Nano SIMs with both supporting 4G network. The internal storage with this phone is 32GB out of which the firmware takes around 6GB and we’re left with around 26GB. For some users, it’ll be enough but if you want more, you can always expand the storage using a MicroSD card up to 256GB.

Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, GLONAS, 2.0 Micro-USB. The sensors that are included are Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor, Compass and Fingerprint sensor. The face detection works with the front camera.

Verdict

The Honor 7C is a budget phone that is well built and rests well in the hand. It looks really good with the dual cameras and the large screen and feels premiuim. It has a dual camera, but I seriously doubt that dual camera is the deciding factor for one to buy this phone over the rivals like Redmi Note 5, RealMe 1, Redmi Y2 etc. And also, considering the price for the 4GB/64GB variant, which is priced at 12999, it’s not worth it. I won’t recommend one to buy the 4GB variant for that price. At that price, one should go for the Asus Zenphone Max Pro M1 4GB variant, which is also priced at 12999, as it offers a much better value for money. And, if you’re going for the 3GB variant, which I’m having, a much better option is to go for the 3GB variant of the Asus Zenphone Max Pro M1 3GB variant, which is priced at 10999. For that extra 1000, what the buyer is getting is a much better phone in all perspective. RealMe 1 is also a good option but it lacks fingerprint scanner and with zenfone, we get the stock Android experience and a bigger battery. Redmi Y2 is also good but MIUI keeps me away from recommending it.

So, as a final word, I’d recommend one to go for the Zenfone Max Pro M1 which is a really better choice over the Honor 7C.
You can also consider the smaller sibling, the Honor 7A, which is a flipkart exclusive. The main differences are the smaller size, plastic body, less powerfull processor and a lower price tag.

(This is actually my first review and those who went through it, please let me know your opinion, suggestions and doubts in the comments section. It'll be really helpful.)

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