We like smartphones with big displays and the Huawei Honor 7x ticks this box the front is dominated by a 5.9” and 1080x2160px screen. It has thin borders on the sides but comparatively thicker ones on the top and bottom. The fingerprint scanner is on the back and Honor has used a metal uni-body for this smartphone giving it that premium look and feel.

The Honor 7x supports a dual camera setup comprising of a 16MP main sensor and 2MP depth sensor. Honor has gone with two distinct rings instead of a single unit like we have seen on most smartphones recently. The cameras protrude a little while the metal rings should be able to keep them scratch free. You also get an 8MP selfie shooter on the front.

The Honor 7x weighs 165 grams which feel about right in the hand. It measures 7.6mm in thickness while packing in a decent 3340mAh battery. Honor supplies a 10W charger in the box that is capable of charging the phone completely in two and half hours.

In terms of the hardware, the Huawei Honor 7x is powered by a Huawei Kirin 659 SOC which is an octa-core processor with 4 cores clocked at 1.7GHz and the other 4 cores clocked at 2.36GHz. There is 4GB RAM and you can choose between 32GB and 64GB of internal storage. It is a hybrid Dual-SIM device with two Nano SIM slots which means you can swap the second SIM for a microSD card of up to 256GB capacity.

You get UMUI 5.1 on top of Android Nougat. The custom UI is different from stock Android but it shouldn’t take long getting used to. The full view display doesn’t make 100 use very easy. The top corners are hard to reach. EMUI has a built-in one handed more that shrinks the UI down to one corner of the screen when you swipe across the navigation buttons.

The Honor 7x is a decent performer. We did not face any slowdowns during the duration of the review. The power is powerful enough to run most games without any issues. However, we notice that the device would get warm to the touch accompanied by a higher battery drain after gaming for a while. With light to medium use, the phone lasted as one working day but playing games and watching videos had a significant impact on battery life. There are power saving modes that help the phone saved power when idle which might help. The camera app is fairly easy to use and apart from the auto mode, you can select wide aperture, moving picture and portrait modes. You get a lot of others to choose from as well, including a Pro Photo mode that lets you fine-tune camera parameters before taking a shot. You can also download additional features if required.

Photos taken from the Huawei Honor 7x look good at first glance. However, zoom into landscape shots and you can see that the Honor 7x missed out on details and delivers a slightly grainy output. Macros are good and there is a good separation between subjects and backgrounds. Shooting at night needs a steady hand the phone keeps noise low but sharpens the output reducing its quality. Selfies are grainy as well but are good enough to be shared on social media.

Huawei Honor 7X detailed specifications

With the Honor 7x the X series have been brought up to date you get a big display with the 18:9 aspect ratio and powerful hardware which should keep you happy. Camera performance isn’t up to the mark and the battery life could have been a little better. If you want a modern looking phone, then the Honor 7x is a good choice but if you want an all-rounder the Xiaomi Mi A1 would be a better pick.