- Dual cameras, an aluminum build,
a fingerprint sensor, a bezel-less display,
and a headphone jack in a smartphone in 2017?
Hey guys, this is Austin.
When Honor reached out and wanted to sponsor
a video on their brand new 7X,
all I needed was the word headphone jack and I was in.
Now the first thing I noticed
is that blue is actually pretty nice.
So something I really liked with the original
Pixel was the very blue color.
While this isn't quite so vibrant it is definitely unique.
There's not exactly a lot of other stuff in the box.
There's a European style power plug
as well as a micro USB cable.
The idea here is that you're getting
a lot of what you would expect
on a 2017 flagship but at a much lower price.
So the actual official announcement
of this phone will be on December 5th,
but from what I've heard it's going to be under 300 euros.
Considering the price, this feels good.
So the design actually reminds
me a little bit of the iPhone 7.
It has very rounded corners it's a bit of a seamless design,
but when you flip it around front
the screen is a lot bigger.
While it would be nice to see USB-C
on the bottom instead of the micro USB port,
we do however get the headphone jack.
I will say that the bottom firing speaker
on this is maybe not quite as loud as I'd like,
but the addition of the headphone jack
kind of evens that out for me.
There's also a fingerprint sensor on board, and it's fast.
Basically as soon as you put your finger
on the button the phone wakes right up.
Inside it's powered by a Kirin 659 octa-core processor,
4 gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigs of storage.
Kirin is Huawei and Honor's SOC manufacturer,
so unlike pretty much every other
phone out there that has a snapdragon chip,
this is going to be something a little different.
And Honor claims that this should be able to hold up better
under longer periods of use, such as gaming.
When you get into a game like Modern Combat 5,
you'll see that it actually holds up pretty well,
and it does take advantage of the 18 by 9 display.
So while yes, this is not going to have
the same power as something like a flagship,
it looks surprisingly good and for pretty much
any game that's available on Android
it should be able to handle it.
And with a 3340 milliamp hour battery,
you should be able to get some
pretty good gaming in on this guy.
Honor claims that it should last up to
a day and half of normal usage.
Software wise we have Android 7.0 with EMUI 5.1 on top.
This is a bit of a heavier skin
however you can customize it by re-enabling
the app drawer which is what I've done here,
and there are some cool features
like being able to pull down and get something
very similar to Spotlight.
A big selling point of the Honor 7X
is the bezel-less display.
So it's rocking a 6-inch 2160 by 1080 max view panel.
When you look at it up front it's pretty much all screen.
So it has similar screen to body ratio
to something like a Galaxy Note 8.
And while yes, the panel itself is not maybe
the most color accurate thing in the world,
at this kind of price there's not much to complain about.
Plus, that wider 18 by 9 aspect ratio
does a really good job of showing you
more wide screen videos such as our iPhone X Is It Worth It,
it fills out a lot more of the screen.
One of my favorite budget phones of this year,
is the Moto E4 Plus.
With a 5.5 inch screen it's actually
a fairly similar size to the Honor,
however you can see just how much less screen
real estate you actually have to work with here.
Having such a big display is also helpful
when it comes to split screen.
So you tap and hold on the multitasking,
you can pull up like another app,
and if you want you can be watching a video at the same time
as you're scrolling through a web page,
replying to a message, whatever.
Around back we have two cameras.
A 16 megapixel main shooter backed up with a 2 megapixel
secondary camera for stuff like portrait mode.
(Laughs) Wow, that's so stylized.
Let's go crazy town on this.
You can tell they're really sorta
pushing the shadows and the highlights,
but with this sort of wide aperture mode
that's an interesting look.
I mean, it's different.
Get a little bit of HDR action
see what the dynamic range is like.
That's not bad.
I mean it helps it's a little bit cloudy right now,
but it's pretty much keeping everything in the shot.
You can also enable a simulated bokeh
for the front facing camera.
The front facing portrait actually doesn't look bad.
So it does lose a little bit of the side
of my face and especially the glasses
which a lot of phones have a problem with,
but considering that it's doing this purely on software,
whereas on the rear facing cameras you do have
that secondary camera to sort of figure out the depth,
this isn't bad.
This is what the 1080p video looks like from the Honor 7X.
So while it would be nice to have 4K,
the stabilization is actually not too bad
and even when I'm kinda trying to move around
and change exposure stuff it holds up pretty well.
The Honor 7X is an interesting phone.
So considering the price there's a lot to like.
Stuff like the bezel-less display, the dual cameras,
the good build quality, solid battery life.
But the question is what this thing actually costs.
Honor will be announcing the full price of the 7X
at a launch event on December 5th,
and I'm very curious to see exactly where this lines up,
because if the price is right it's really compelling phone.
So, what do you guys think of the Honor 7X?
Let me know in the comments below,
and I will catch you in the next one.