Honor 7A

Back in April, Honor announced two budget smartphones to fill out the lower end of its range. The £139.99 (about $185, AU$250) Honor 7A is the cheaper of the two, the other being the £169.99 (about $225, AU$303) Honor 7C.

The more expensive phone adds slightly better specs and a dual camera: the 7C has a 5.99-inch HD+ display to the 7A's 5.7-incher, a Snapdragon 450 chipset to the 7A's Snapdragon 430, 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB, double the internal storage at 32GB, and dual 13MP + 2MP rear cameras in place of the 7A's solo 13MP snapper.

Both phones have an 8MP front-facing camera and 3,000mAh battery, and run Android 8.0 Oreo with the mothership Huawei's EMUI 8 on top.

However, it seems Honor is expecting the 7A to have more widespread appeal, given that it's decided to stock the phone at a range of UK retailers including AO.com, Argos, Carphone Warehouse, John Lewis, Three and Very, in addition to the Honor website, while the 7C will only be available at the latter.

Honor 7A price and availability

• Launch price: £139.99 (about $185, AU$250)
• Current price: £139.99 (about $185, AU$250)
• Launch date: May 2018

The Honor 7A is available in the UK now from the Three network, directly from Honor, and from retailers including AO.com and Argos.

Currently, we don't have any details of the Honor 7A coming to the US or Australia, but we'll update you if we hear more.

Design and display

• 5.7-inch 18:9 'FullView' display, 720 x 1440
• 152.4 x 73 x 7.8mm, 150g
• Rear-mounted fingerprint scanner

Handsets this inexpensive often feel like toys, but that's not the case with the Honor 7A. It's weighty enough to feel solid, and - particularly in the blue colorway of our review unit - actually looks quite smart.

The metallic navy blue with silver antenna lines isn't as eye-catching as the laser-like finish of the flagship Honor 10, of course, and unlike that phone it's plastic, but it nonetheless looks plenty good enough to show off without a case.

As with many Honor handsets, the fingerprint sensor is circular and found on the back. The camera and flash are enclosed within a slightly-raised horizontal oval up top. 

There's some subtle blue branding at the bottom, and a more noticeable logo on the lower bezel of the front face, rendered in silver on black.

Those bezels are thicker than some will appreciate, but in fairness the tall, sizeable display makes them appear to fade somewhat when the screen is powered on. 

The rounded edges of the handset have been given a mirror shine, which looks a little cheap to our eyes but will probably please the young market Honor likes to court.

The left edge houses the SIM tray, which unusually has space for two SIMs and a microSD card (often the second SIM slot doubles as microSD, so you have to choose).

The top left edge contains the 3.5mm headphone jack (annoyingly slightly off-center), and there's the usual volume rocker bar and power key on the right edge. 

There's no etching on the latter to help you find it by feel, but we didn't have much trouble locating it or mixing it up with the volume keys in day-to-day use.

Between the two sets of drilled holes on the bottom end (only one of which is a speaker) is the charging port, which is the old-style micro USB. 

Yes, this is a cheap handset, but we feel like the time has surely come to switch even the lower-end phones to the superior USB-C standard. Still, it's entirely forgivable, especially when many competing budget phones have the same port.

Another area where the price tag shows is the display. Yes, it's a good size at 5.7 inches, and has the currently-favored 18:9 aspect ratio, but it's only 720p - in other words HD, but not full HD. 

Again, it seems to us that the time for 720p budget phones may be about to pass: even the £95 ($149, AU$199) Alcatel 3V manages 1080p.

At 720 x 1440 pixels and 5.7 inches diagonally, the screen comes out at a paltry 282 pixels per inch. That's not great, and a slight softness of text and icons is noticeable, especially up close.

There's a good range of brightness levels, though, and both color and touch performance are perfectly good. 

In fairness, a lot of people won't notice the lower-resolution screen, but it's still disappointing to see 'only' HD when other brands have proven full HD can be workable at this price and even lower.

Another big omission is NFC. You won't be able to use Google's contactless payment tech - Android Pay - on this handset as a result. Even at this price, that's pretty disappointing.

On the bright side, the 7A is one of the cheapest phones to include Face Unlock, if that's important to you.

We tried fooling it with different hairstyles, makeup and glasses and it still worked (albeit slightly slower than other phones), but as ever, it's worth remembering that this type of unlocking is less secure than using your fingerprint, and since it seems to be an afterthought on this phone (it was added using an OTA update), it's probably not the most robust version of this feature.

We couldn't fool it with a photo, but we still wouldn't put all our trust in it, especially when there's a fingerprint scanner right there.

Battery life

• 3,000mAh battery mostly lasts the day
• Old-style USB port
• No fast charging

That lower-res screen has done the Honor 7A something of a favor here: since there are fewer pixels to power, its battery lasts a little longer than you'd expect if you're used to denser displays.

We ran our usual battery test: 90 minutes of full screen HD video over Wi-Fi, with the screen set to max brightness and accounts syncing in the background.

From a full charge, the Honor 7A had 77% of its power left at the end of the test, a loss of 23%. In other words, you could expect to watch at least 5 hours of video before you ran the battery out, even if you were using it for other things too.

For comparison, the Moto G5 lost a very similar 22% in this test, while the Nokia 3 (2017) lost just 16%. On the other hand, the Nokia 5 (2017) lost a whopping 37% of its power in this test, and the Alcatel 3V lost 35%. So it could be better, but it could also be a lot worse.

For daily use, again we found the 7A lasted longer than we anticipated - but part of the reason for that is that due to its lower processing abilities, we weren't actually able to use it for as many tasks as we usually would.

For instance, more than once we gave up waiting for the camera app to stop hanging and just didn't take a photo/video, and we mostly avoided intensive gaming after the first few bad experiences. Yes, this means the battery lasts longer, but at the cost of actually using the phone.

In fairness, though, the battery does also deplete more slowly than it could given the price. 3,000mAh is a reasonably generous power pack, and it lasted us all day on most of the days we used it (fairly lightly).

Charging it back up again is a slower affair than on most modern phones, due to the old-style micro USB port and lack of any kind of fast charging. Still, if you're the plug-it-in-and-leave-it-all-night type, as many people are, you probably won't even notice.

Camera

• 13MP rear camera with autofocus (f/2.0)
• 8MP selfie camera (f/2.2)
• 'Selfie toning light'

We half-expected to see a dual-camera setup here, considering the much cheaper Alcatel 3V has one, as does the next model up (the Honor 7C). But no, you just get the one 13MP snapper on the back, and an 8MP front-facing camera.

The main issue with the cameras isn't their performance, but the phone's. We had enormous trouble getting the app to open, to respond, and to take pictures in anything like a timely manner. Speed-wise, it was like using your nan's spyware-stuffed Windows XP PC at times.

When the app was working, we got good pictures out of the main camera as long as there was decently strong light. Sunny days and brightly-lit shots are no trouble for the 7A, but trickier light environments resulted in much less usable photos.

For instance, we tried photographing a black cat in a lamplit room, and got a whole lot of darkness (although the flash did a good job of brightening it up).

On the selfie side, again the f/2.2 front-facing camera performs well in good lighting, and also has a bright white LED for 'selfie toning' in lower light. 

You turn this on like a flash (it comes up in the menu as 'soft flash' but it's actually pretty harsh), and it stays lit while you take your photo (it doesn't actually flash).

You can also dial up the brightness (tap the 1 in the bottom right corner), which makes it even more blinding. It does definitely help in dark environments, but the result isn't overly flattering.

Speaking of unflattering selfies, the beauty mode on this phone doesn't appear to do much - until you take the photo and open it. The difference is pretty subtle until afterwards, unlike many phones which show the effect live as you're looking at the screen.

This is worth being aware of, because level 10 beauty mode on this phone gives your eyes alien-esque proportions, and you might not realize until after the photo's been saved.

Besides the performance problems, the Honor camera app is as usable as ever. It includes fewer extra modes on the 7A than other Honor phones, presumably because the handset can't handle some of the more processor-intensive ones, but you can download a few more. Sadly, Honor/Huawei's excellent night modes aren't there.

Videos on the Honor 7A suffer from the same problems as photos, with the addition of no stabilization (we wouldn't have expected OIS at this price, but maybe EIS). They default to 720p, but you can jack them up to 1080p at 30fps with software if you must.

Camera samples

Interface

• Android 8.0 Oreo
• Huawei's divisive overlay
• Some bloatware

The Honor 7A comes with the latest version of Android Oreo (8.0 rather than 8.1). However, pasted over the top is the parent company Huawei's proprietary interface, called EMUI (Emotion UI), version 8.0.

While it's fair to say some people won't even notice, if you're coming from either an iPhone or an Android with something closer to stock, you're probably going to notice the somewhat psychedelic color scheme and nursery-school app icons. 

No doubt it'll suit some people's taste, but EMUI is one of the more disliked features of Honor and Huawei phones.

On the home screen, you'll find a Huawei app called Themes that allows you to change up the look and feel of the phone. Some of the options are fairly terrible, but there's a huge range including ones created by fans, so you should be able to find something you can live with.

If you prefer the Android app drawer (menu) to the iPhone-style everything-in-folders-on-the-home-screen approach, you'll want to go to Settings > Display > Home Screen Style and change it to Drawer.

That will bring back the menu of app icons, so you don't have to have a million home screens, but annoyingly you have to bring up the drawer using the old-style round key on the center of the quick apps bar - you can't swipe up on the home screen to open the app drawer as you can in stock Oreo.

As is often the case with budget phones, the 7A includes some pre-installed apps and games outside the native Android stuff. 

There's racing game Asphalt Nitro, Assassin's Creed Unity: Arno's Chronicles (which crashed on opening), Booking.com, Dragon Mania, eBay, Kingdoms, Puzzle Pets, Spider-Man: Ultimate Power, and so on.

There's also a sprinkling of manufacturer apps, like HiCare and the Honor app. Out of the box, we had just 5GB of the 16GB of storage left, and these apps are one reason for that. On the bright side, some - though not all - can be uninstalled.

Movies, music and gaming

• Cinematic 18:9 screen ratio
• Karaoke mode, party mode
• Not great for gaming

Honor aims its devices at a youthful, fun-loving market, which might explain some of the sound features the 7A comes with. One is karaoke mode, which "offers real-time audio monitoring through your earbuds and supports SWS3.1 virtual bass, allowing you to replicate the recording studio experience and hear your own voice while recording your singing." This is… niche, but perhaps less so in some markets.

The second feature is party mode, which lets you connect up to 8 Honor 7A handsets and play the same music across all of them. In theory this is cool. In practice, good luck finding anyone at the party who also has an Honor phone, let alone a 7A specifically.

Party mode is a great idea for a cross-platform service (maybe I go to the wrong sort of parties, but even finding someone with an Android can be tricky, so it'd need to include iOS) but we can't see many people getting much use out of it on the Honor 7A.

It's a slightly curious decision to focus on surround sound on this handset, because it's only been given one speaker, so you'd need two of them to even get decent stereo. There are two sets of six holes on the bottom edge of the Honor 7A, but only one side houses a speaker.

That said, it does a better job than we expected for the price. Music sounds decently well-rounded and goes uncomfortably loud, albeit with the usual back panel rattling and distortion at the highest volumes. It's not amazing, but it's better than some more expensive phones we've heard.

Another, slightly handier feature is the ability to connect to two Bluetooth devices at once. Honor says this is helpful for listening to music while making hands-free calls, but we could also see ourselves using it to connect to wearables while streaming music to a speaker, for instance.

The 18:9 display is ideally suited to watching films, and while obviously they won't look as stunning as on a higher-end (or even full HD) handset, they look perfectly sharp and watchable on the Honor 7A's screen.

However, you're not going to fit many on the phone's paltry 16GB of internal storage (which had just 5GB left out of the box), so you're going to want to take advantage of the microSD card slot, which can increase space by up to 256GB.

Gaming on this phone is sadly not a good experience. Unusually for an Honor device, the 7A doesn't use the parent company Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin line of chipsets. Instead, it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430, which offers eight Cortex-A53 cores at clock speeds of up to 1.4GHz - not great for 2018.

This is paired with just 2GB of RAM, and together the result is sluggish performance and a pretty poor experience on more demanding games.

We ran the Geekbench 4 benchmarking tool and got an average multi-core score of 2,745 for the Honor 7A. On the league table, that puts it about on par with 2015 flagships the OnePlus 2 (2,756) and Sony Xperia Z5 (2,714).

The phone gets fairly warm during intensive use and starts to slow down and stutter. Graphical glitches and even crashes became familiar, not just in terms of gaming but also just using the phone in general.

Multitasking and app-switching can be downright laborious on this phone, and don't get us started on the number of times the camera app hung or outright crashed. 

While waiting in a churchyard for the camera app to stop malfunctioning so we could take some test shots, we were waiting so long that a suspicious church employee came over to check what we were up to.

We found ourselves rebooting this phone several times to try and improve performance or fix problems, but it didn't make a difference. Apps, especially large ones like games, can be slow to open - if they open at all. We'd say perhaps we were being unfair by trying to play Assassin's Creed on such a budget phone, except that it came pre-installed!

All of that said, not everyone is into the kind of high-performance game that causes this phone issues. 

If you're more about the Angry Birds or Candy Crush style of gaming, you'll be absolutely fine - after all, those games came out when 2GB was pretty standard for phone RAM. Just don't expect to use it for PUBG, because that's not going to be pretty.

Verdict

It's not terrible by any means, but with so many other budget handsets offering a better experience and more features, we struggle to recommend the Honor 7A even at this price.

We're not sure any price cut is worth a phone that just won't function sometimes (and if it's like this within the first few months, it's not going to be much fun to use in a year).

The screen and cameras are good, there's an 18:9 aspect ratio and face unlock for trend fans, and the whole thing looks surprisingly nice for being made out of plastic. But those performance problems are a deal-breaker, and the lack of NFC is the (missing) cherry on top.

Who's this for?

If you really like Honor and Huawei phones, are looking for a low-cost device that looks stylish enough and will handle day-to-day smartphone tasks, and you're not interested in Android Pay or much gaming, you might like this phone. But even then, the performance issues would give us pause.

Should you buy it?

If Honor provides some fixes for the issues with this phone, or you don't like any of the other options in this price bracket and can't go any higher in price, you might want to buy the Honor 7A. 

Otherwise, sadly we can't recommend it to many people in its current form.

There are various accomplished alternatives to the Honor 7A, such as the following three phones:

Moto G5

Now that it has come down to around £120 (though not available in the US, and about AU$299 in Australia), the aging Moto G5 is a strong contender in this price bracket.

The 5-inch screen is 1080p, the stylish body is part metal with a fingerprint scanner, and it includes quick charging. However, like the 7A, it doesn't have NFC.

• Read our full Moto G5 review

Nokia 3 (2018)

Specs-wise, this is very similar to the 7A: a 720p 18:9 screen (albeit smaller at 5.2 inches), 16GB of storage with 2GB of RAM, a 2,990mAh battery, lower-end chipset and 13MP/8MP cameras.

However, it's cheaper at €139 (about $160, £120, AU$215), lighter at 138g, and - the big one - runs stock Android instead of EMUI. Some versions also have NFC and there's a pricier model with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

• Read our hands on Nokia 3 (2018) review

Honor 7C

If you're sold on a lower-end Honor phone, you might want to trade up a little and go for the higher-spec version. It's not as widely available and costs a little more at £169.99 (about $225, AU$305), but for that you get a bigger 18:9 screen at 5.99 inches (still 720p, though), a higher-end Snapdragon 450 chipset, slightly more RAM at 3GB and double the storage at 32GB. You also get a dual-lens rear camera and a metal build.

• Read our hands on Honor 7C review

First reviewed: June 2018

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