GadgetByte Nepal

Huawei has announced a new successor of its Ascend line up as Huawei Ascend P7. We recently had the phone arrive at our office to show-off its new features and new body. And we were quite happy on what we saw! Here we go!

AT A GLANCE

• 3G with LTE
• 5″ 1080p IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with Gorilla Glass 3
• Android OS: 4.4.2 KitKat with Emotion UI
• Quad-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A9, Mali-450 GPU
• 2GB of RAM; Huawei Kirin 910T chipset
• 13MP rear camera
• 8MP front-facing, wide angle camera
• 16GB of built-in storage (12GB available)
• microSD card upto 64GB
• 2,500mAh battery

DESIGN

With a two-side Gorilla Glass Protection (yeah, you heard it right!), Huawei Ascend P7 is a very good looking smartphone from the first look itself. Also to note, the body was really light. Well, Kudos to the designers, they have managed to fit in everything inside a beautiful body otherwise seen only in iPhones. The headphone jack has left its awkward position from the side to the top of the smartphone whereas other hardware keys are at the same position.

DISPLAY

The display on the Huawei Ascend p7 is simply gorgeous. With a pixel density of ~441 ppi text and images are relatively sharp and the screen has brilliant color reproduction. The 1080×1920 resolution makes sure that the 5-inch screen doesn’t go wasted.

PERFORMANCE

Performance wise this device was never a let down. I used to have a very minute lag while changing themes or wallpapers but that can be off-put watching the phone behave while multitasking or playing games. I played quite a few games and noticed no lag. While the relationship between Kirin chipset and benchmarking apps are not good yet, it managed to pull-up a score of 25575 on AnTuTu, which is definitely not jaw-dropping but is considerable. The phone however, seems to reconcile this with Optimization features inbuilt. With my time on this phone, i had an average of 850MB of RAM freely available which is a very good thing.

EMOTION UI 2.3

The phone operates on Android KitKat OS topped up with Huawei’s own Emotion UI. Well, some people might not like the “iPhone style homescreen” of the Emotion UI but that can always be changed with 3rd party launchers. On the other side there are various apps and functions like Suspend, NFC tags, Phone Manager, Simple UI, Ultra Power Saving (talked later), etc. All in all it does a good job to compliment the beautiful screen nevertheless.

CAMERA

The Huawei Ascend P7 comes with a 13 MP rear camera with BSI and boasts a 8 MP wide-angle front facing shooter. While this might not be a game-changer this is certainly worth noticing. The rear camera takes fine pictures with tiny granules sometimes wich can be seen on zooming. The front camera though lives upto its billing with brilliant photo and video shooting. It also has wide lens and captures selfie-panorama too. Both the cameras are capable of taking 1080p videos.

BATTERY

While we had not much hands-on time with the phone to completely judge its battery, we feel that the 2500 mAh battery should keep the juice up and running with average usage for a day at least. GSMArena has rated it to 53 hours of endurance rating which means  the Ascend P7 will last two and a little over two days on a full charge with an hour each of calling, browsing and watching video daily. Plus there’s a new Ultra Power Saving Mode (accessible from the Notification tray) that makes your phone behave like a feature phone cutting off everything and letting you access to only the basic apps like Dialer and Messaging. This feature, we think, should come really handy in those last percentages of battery.

MULTIMEDIA and OTHERS

We were frankly impressed by the earphones that came with the unit. They are by far one of the best earphones that come with an smartphone that i’ve ever seen. Also the Speakers do a loud and clear job with production of sound and gives out decent crisp sounds. Multimedia experience, on the other hand, is really good with the brilliant 1080p screen.

VERDICT

This phone, the Huawei Ascend P7 is up with beautiful slim & light design and packs a punch when it comes to display. The decent Camera and good battery make this phone even more desirable. The only talking point now would be the pricing of the Smartphone which we believe will play a key role in its sales here in Nepal. If it matches the price tag of around 50,000, this phone will certainly be a bang for the buck! With such design, good performance and a decent camera we certainly think this phone is a Glass Class!