Honor 7X Review – The £269 Smartphone

1. Introduction2. Design & Display3. Performance & Software4. Camera & Battery5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Performance

Powering the Honor 7X is a Kirin 659 processor, paired with 4GB RAM.

In our synthetic benchmarks, the 7X does slip behind – as we would expect considering the other four phones are significantly more expensive.

Day-to-day performance of the phone is still good, though, with just the occasional slow-down here and there. It may not be the fastest phone out there, but switching between apps is still snappy and games like Dune run smoothly.

One last thing to mention here is that the phone doesn't actually support NFC, so you can't use Android Pay or use the Tube with the 7X. Personally this isn't something that I use myself, but I know it could be a significant loss to some people.

Software

The Honor 7X ships with Huawei's EMUI 5.1 software, which runs over Android Nougat 7.0. It is a bit surprising to see the phone running Nougat, and not Oreo – especially considering the similarly-new Huawei Mate 10 Pro is running the latest software.

As it is, the software is generally OK, with a configurable launcher and a theme store to customise the look and feel of the phone.

I'm not keen on the quick settings drop-down panel, though. The icons are small (and ugly) and it is all a bit dark, making it harder to access your desired shortcut quickly. There aren't a whole lot of other settings which can be added to the drop-down panel, either, as users can only choose from a pre-configured list.

The main settings menu is fine, with extra options for things like the dual-sim configuration and launcher settings, so no problems there.

However, one of the most frustrating aspects of the software is the seemingly endless ‘full screen display' prompt that sits above the home buttons. This occurs when an app that doesn't natively support the 18:9 display is opened – the phone prompts you to enable scaling within the app to ensure the app fills the whole screen.

The scaling itself works well, but it is very annoying to have to manually enable scaling on almost every app on your phone. The prompt only goes away once you've enabled the scaling, too, so it just sits there the whole time until you press on it. Why Honor couldn't enable a one-time prompt asking if you want to scale all your apps is beyond me.

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