Honor 7S first impressions: A decent budget smartphone

Name: Honor 7S first impressions: A decent budget smartphone
Item: Honor 7S first impressions: A decent budget smartphone
Rating: 3.0
Author: Karan

Honor launched its latest budget smartphone the 7S in Indian smartphone market. And here we are with the first impression of the smartphone.

By Karan

| Published: Tuesday, September 4, 2018, 14:45 [IST]

In the last couple of months, Indian smartphone market has seen a lot of product launches. Smartphones makers like Honor, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo have contributed a lot of devices in the budget and mid-range segment. The companies are not holding themselves back in offering the high-end smartphones in the budget price segment. And this is ultimately working in the favour of end-users.

Honor 7S first impressions: A decent budget smartphone

Huawei's sub-brand Honor is back with a new budget phone called the Honor 7S. The company has launched this new smartphone for the price conscious Indian buyers. However, unlike the other budget smartphones, this one comes sans the notch and dual-lens camera module. We got the opportunity to use and play around with the device, so here is our first impression of the Honor 7S.

Display

The Honor 7S sports a 5.4-inch HD+ display along with a screen resolution of 1440x720 pixels. The display comes with an aspect ratio of 18:9. The phone offers 85 percent screen-to-body-ratio which makes it easier to operate with one hand. The display is not very sharp as it only offers HD+ resolution but it is bright, responsive and colours are also balanced. Considering the price of the device, the display quality is quite impressive.

The screen is comparatively smaller in size as compared to other smartphones in this respective price-point, but it will still serve well for streaming YouTube videos and low-end games. The Honor 7S comes with an eye protection mode that applies a blue light filter to the display making it easier to read during night.

Design

The design of the smartphone is pretty decent for its price. It comes with a matte finished back panel that houses a single camera module at the top left corner along with an LED flash. There is an Honor branding on the rear panel, but the smartphone lacks a fingerprint scanner.

The right side of the Honor 7S houses the volume rockers and the power key. Whereas, the SIM card tray is placed on the left side. The device has a micro USB port for charging and data transfers which are placed at the bottom panel. While the 3.5mm headphone jack is placed on the top of the phone.

Overall, Honor 7S comes out as a neatly designed budget smartphone which is compact enough to be used with one hand. However, it misses out on important features like fingerprint scanner and a dual-lens camera setup.

Camera

Dual-lens camera setup has become a standard feature even in budget price-point; however, Honor 7S misses out on this trend and boasts a single lens camera at the back. The rear camera sports a 13-megapixel sensor along with an LED flash. The camera app offer modes such as Beauty, HDR and Panorama. You can also turn on the camera by pressing the volume rocker key twice when the device is locked. We have tested the camera in both daylight and low light conditions, and it captures decent quality images.We will spend some more time with the device to find out more on the camera performance.

How can we forget the selfie camera, the Honor 7S offers a 5-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 aperture. The front camera offers Beauty feature, but isn't very effective. Though it allows you to customize the strength of beauty filter, it often blurs the final output and softens the selfies. Even with the normal setting, we didn't find the edges of the images sharp enough.

Hardware and Software

The Honor 7S runs on Android 8.1 Oreo out-of-the-box. Under the hood, the smartphone is powered by a quad-core MediaTek MT6739 SoC, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of inbuilt storage. If that is not enough then you can also expand the storage up to 256GB via microSD. The on-sheet specs of the device suggest that the Honor 7S should be able to handle multitasking with ease and give a lag-free user experience. However, we will share further details in a comprehensive review of Honor 7S.

Battery and Connectivity

Honor 7S is powered by a 3020mAh battery unit with smart management capabilities, which could easily last for a day. It would be interesting to see how long the battery lasts with heavy usage.

The connectivity aspects of the Honor 7S includes support for Bluetooth 4.2, 4G VoLTE, OTG support, a 3.5mm headphone jack for audio output, and FM radio among others.

Verdict

Honor 7S is one of the most affordable smartphones from Honor for the Indian market. It features a handy design in sub Rs 10k segment and offers expandable storage. Priced at Rs. 8,999, the smartphone sure has some areas to improve, but it makes up for the loss with its sturdy design and decent performance. The smartphone will compete head-on with Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Xiaomi Redmi 5, and Infinix Note 5.

It would be interesting to see how well the Honor 7S holds up when pitted against other smartphones in the same segment. So if you look beyond the flaws of the device, this could be your primary choice. We will soon be bringing our comprenhensive review of the device so stay tuned.