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Honor 7C first look Review

Verdict

Key Specifications

  • Review Price: £169.99
  • 5.7-inch FullView 18:9 LCD screen
  • Snapdragon 450 CPU
  • 3GB of RAM
  • Face recognition
  • 3000mAh battery

What is the Honor 7C?

The Honor 7C is Chinese manufacturer Honor’s latest affordable mid-range smartphone, armed with a Snapdragon 450 CPU and 3GB of RAM. It’s available to purchase in the United Kingdom through the firm’s dedicated website for £169.99, making it one of the cheapest dual-camera smartphones on the market.

Editors Note: Due to the recent retraction of Huawei’s Android license, future Huawei and Honor phones won’t be able to access Google Play Services and as a result many Android apps including YouTube and Gmail. Both Huawei and Google have confirmed Huawei and Honor phones, like the one in this review, will continue to have access for this time being. Until we know more about the situation we’re leaving the scores on all our Huawei reviews, however as the situation changes we’ll revisit this.

Honor 7C specs: Is it powerful?

Honor 7C
Battery 3000mAh
Camera (Front) 8MP with LED flash
Camera (Rear) 13MP + 2MP
Display 5.7-inch 18:9 FullView (1440 x 720)
Processor Snapdragon 450
Storage 32GB (expandable via microSD)
RAM 3GB

Honor 7C first look: What’s it like?

Good. That’s the first word that came to mind when I asked myself what I thought of the Honor 7C. It’s well made, crafted from a mixture of aluminium and 2.5D tempered glass – a design combo that’s typically reserved for high-end smartphones. It also seems to be fast, handling everyday tasks such as browsing the web with ease.

Related: Best budget phones

Honor 7C smartphone displaying time and colorful wallpaper.Hand holding Honor 7C smartphone with colorful wallpaper displayed.

Sure, the rear-facing dual camera (13 megapixels + 2 megapixels) isn’t likely to rival those on the Apple iPhone X, Huawei P20 and Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus – but that’s because it wasn’t designed to. Honor set out to develop the cheapest, not the best, dual-camera smartphone on the market – and first impressions suggest that it’s there or thereabouts.

I didn’t have enough time with the unit to put the main camera through its paces in full, but the few samples I flicked through were adequate. Shots taken in daylight looked crisp, delivering a fantastic ‘bokeh’ effect in the various test shots. Those taken at night lacked both clarity and detail, which is par for the course with most cameras on all but high-end phones.

The front-facing camera, on the other hand, is something to write home about. It’s a standard 8-megapixel sensor, which, when paired with the LED flash, seems impressive. The resulting selfie is brimming with detail, even when the environment it was shot in wasn’t optimised for photography (think: a nightclub).

We’ll put the Honor 7C’s camera through its paces properly during our full review to see whether these sample images are a good indication of real-world performance.

Honor 7C smartphone on blue textured background.

The display is another matter, however. The 5.7-inch 18:9 FullView (1440 x 720) LCD screen didn’t really impress, delivering sub-par viewing angles and a disappointing maximum brightness. Text isn’t sharp enough to be easily read, in part due to the standard HD resolution, and colours appear way off base.

Honor 7C release date and price: When will it hit the shelves, and how much will it cost?

The Honor 7C is available to purchase in the United Kingdom through Honor’s official website for £169.99 SIM-free.

We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.

Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.

Used as our main phone for the review period

Reviewed using respected industry benchmarks and real world testing

Always has a SIM card installed

Tested with phone calls, games and popular apps

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