The mid-range market in Pakistan is getting saturated with phones that have similar specifications and almost cost the same, making it impossible for consumers to decide which smartphone to go with.
The phone we’re going to review today will give you another option to choose from when looking for an affordable yet capable smartphone.
Meet the Honor 7A, which carries a price tag of Rs. 17,999/ in Pakistan. Originally the phone’s price was Rs. 15,000, but due to the recent increase in US Dollar’s value vs Rupee, the phone’s price also went up.
Video Review
Design and Display
First of all, let’s look at the build quality of the phone. You’ll notice that it uses a plastic build which is actually pretty common in lower-end mid-range smartphones. However, both the back and sides of the Honor 7A have different finishes of plastic. The back has a matte textured finished while the sides have a shiny, glossy finish.
The right side houses the power button and volume rocker whereas the left side has a SIM card tray. Moving on to the back, you’ll find a single camera with an LED flash and a fingerprint scanner in the middle of the phone body. Moving on to the front, you have the display on top of which are located the usual sensors, front facing camera, and an earpiece.
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Talking about the actual display itself, it is a 5.7-inch IPS LCD panel with a resolution of 720x1440p. Given the large size of the screen, the resolution is too low, but that is what just you usually expect at this price range. The sharpness is obviously not that great, especially when compared to a 1080p panel side by side. Brightness was also on the lower side, making the screen difficult to view in direct sunlight. Move to indoor conditions and things get better.
Performance
Before talking about how the phone performed, let’s get the specifications out of the way first. The Honor 7A uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chipset along with 2 GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage. While the Qualcomm chip being used here is also a low-end model, it is not a MediaTek chipset so the Honor 7A does have that edge over most other smartphones in this segment.
However, given that it uses EMUI skin on top of stock Android, performance suffers. For day to day tasks such as opening the dialer, messaging etc, it performs great. Move on to resource-intensive applications and things start getting worse. Loading times for some of the apps were poor while other applications lagged when scrolling through them.
Camera
On the back of the phone, you have a 13MP sensor along with a LED flash. The Pakistani variant of the Honor 7A does not have a dual rear-facing camera so you’re stuck with a single sensor. The front has an 8MP camera.
Moving on to the actual picture quality, it was decent. The camera held up well in good lighting conditions, with plenty of detail and sharpness. The dynamic range was poor, which is no surprise. The colors were natural and there was no over saturation which is the case with most other Honor phones.
Things start to fall apart as soon as you start shooting in low light. Noise starts showing up and details take a hit. However, the some of our shots were definitely usable.
Camera Samples
Battery
The Honor 7A has a 3,000mAh battery which may sound low, but considering the lower resolution screen, it lasted all day on a single charge.
During real-world testing of the Honor 7A, we took it off of the charger around 9:30 am. The day usually consisted of checking social media, watching a few videos on YouTube, trying to play some games, running benchmarks and taking pictures. Brightness was not on auto and set to 50% and the testing was done with Wi-Fi on all the time.
To our surprise, at around 6:00 pm, the battery percentage was still at 30% which is respectable for a phone having just a 3,000mAh battery. However, as mentioned above, this is mostly due to the lower res screen and the low processing power of the Honor 7A.
Face Unlock
As with most other phones, the Honor 7A has a fingerprint scanner which works well. However, it also includes another solution to unlocking your device, face unlock.
Setting up face unlock on the Honor 7A was also a relatively quick process. Unlocking was quick as well, as long as you are in well-lit conditions. Trying to unlock the device in low light might take a second or two more and sometimes it won’t recognize your face at all, which is understandable, given the lack of an IR camera.
Verdict
Overall, the Honor 7A is a lower end mid-range smartphone with apparent cost-cutting measures at several points, from the build quality to the screen.
Comparing it against its predecessor, the Honor 6A, it doesn’t bring a lot of major changes, but it has some things going for it like its decent camera and an all-day battery. Competition is tough as in this price range, there are a lot of alternatives available as well.
