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As part of the Honor X-series range of handsets, Huawei has released its Honor 7X model.  This smartphone comes with a range of new features designed to appeal to those users prepared to pay £269.99 from sources such as store.hihonor.com, Argos and very.co.uk.

Available in a choice of colours from black (my review sample), blue, gold or red, the Honor 7X has dimensions of 156.3 x 75.3 x 7.6 mm (H x W x D).  Combining a metallic chassis with a 2.5D curved glass design, the Honor 7X handset weighs in at 165g which does included the non-removable Li-Ion 3340 mAh battery pack.  I found that the handset was a comfortable fit within my small hands with easy reach of the various controls decorating the product.

Dominating the front face of this handset is a 5.93 inch screen with a resolution of 1080 x 2160 pixels.  This screen marks the Honor 7X as the first smartphone to feature a Honor FullView Display.  With a 18:9 ratio, the FHD+ display delivers reasonable quality imagery over the full area of the screen when movies are the focus of attention.

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As is usual with Huawei handsets, the volume rocker and power buttons are located on the right side of the unit.  A pop-out slider compartment is concealed on the left side of the handset.  A pin-prick tool is provided in the package to access this slider compartment which can hold dual NANO Sims or a single SIM and a microSD card of up to 256GB to increase the data storage capacity of the Honor 7X.  Arranged along the bottom of the unit are a speaker outlet and 3.5mm jack socket for attaching a headset separated by a micro USB port for charging the internal battery and attaching a USB ToGo tool containing further content when the need arises.

The Honor 7X has front and rear-mounted cameras.  The front mounted model is an 8MP unit with a resolution of 1080p model.  Available options with this model include panorama, video, time lapse, effects, watermark plus a range of settings situated by dragging the screen to the right.  The Honor 7X’s main camera, which is a 16MP+2MP dual lens model, offers a wide range of features.  You get phase detection, autofocus, LED flash and quality checking amongst others.

While it might come as a surprise to some, Huawei has opted to position the unit’s fingerprint reader on the rear of the Honor 7X rather than the more common trend of placing the activation button on the front of the handset.  This facility can be set up during the initial procedure or later if that is more suitable.  This rear-mounted fingerprint uses Sensora technology and caused no problem during the review process.

Packed into the innards of this Gorilla Glass front aluminium body is a HiSicon Kirin 659 octa-core chipset.  This CPU chipset is made up of 4 x 2.36GHz Cortex-A53 and 4 x 1.7GHz Cortex-A53 backed up by a GPU Mail-T830 MP2 and 4GB of RAM.  Depending upon the actual model the Honor 7X can come with a choice of 64GB internal memory or 32/64GB or 32GB with 3GB of RAM.  As mentioned earlier, additional extra storage can be increased by the addition of a microSD card instead of one of the two available SIM options.

Driving this Honor 7X handset is a 3340 mAh Li-Ion battery pack.  Huawei states that this non-removable battery pack should provide up to 647 hours when using 3G on standby and up to  21 hours of 3G talk back action.  Running my usual continuous video watching test, using a USB ToGo connection, I started receiving low battery warning messages after a mere of six hours of video viewing which I felt was a disappointing result.

Running a combination of Android 7.0 (Nougat) and EMUI 5.1, a boot-up from cold takes 35 seconds (not a speed record but reasonable).  The overall performance delivered by the Honor 7X is of a reasonable standard apart from the disappointing length of time produced by the video viewing test.  Switching between apps was acceptable with smooth scrolling and minimal delays.  Overall the Honor 7X is a welcome addition to the Huawei family of products.

https://www.hihonor.com/global/products/mobile-phones/honor7x/index.html