Honor 7C

Honor 7C is Honor’s statement to integrates its phone with the Snapdragon series. Priced at Rs. 8,429, the Honor 7C comes with the benefits of a Snapdragon chip, but it goes for a dated processor, making it a slow phone in terms of its competitors.

Honor 7C is a handsome phone with a good display. But it falters in the rest of its features, arriving with a weak processor and battery, and mediocre cameras. Overall, it is just a phone with style but zero functional advantage.

Honor 7C arrives with a flat metal backplate. The phone has a front 2.5D curved glass, and the display covers the entire front with minimal bezels. The Honor 7C is quite sleek and feels premium too. The horizontal camera module at the back sticks out slightly and is barely discernible. One of the problems with the phone is that it is quite extensive and this makes one-hand use near impossible. However, the phone remains solid and can survive several drops. The fingerprint scanner is well-placed on the rear panel and is ergonomically convenient. The right has the power and volume rocker button, which is quite tactile. The bottom of the phone hosts the Micro-USB port which is beside the 3.5mm headphone jack. The disappointing thing about this phone is the lack of USB Type-C charging. At 164g, the phone remains quite lightweight while being durable.

The Honor 7C comes with a 5.99-inch IPS LCD screen with HD+ resolution and an aspect ratio of 18:9. Honor phones are known for their potent display, but in the 7C, the display quality falters. The viewing angles are just ok, and the colours remain vibrant indoors. But once you take the phone outdoors, the visibility drops. Plus, the display is quite reflective. On top of that, the phone comes with an HD+ panel of 720×1440 resolution, which is quite dated, considering many phones have gone down the Full HD route.

The Honor 7C gets its power from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 chipset. It can be either the 3GB or 4GB variant. The same processor has been used in phones like the Xiaomi Redmi 5 and the Oppo A71 2018. The phone is capable enough to work day-to-day tasks, but the workload should be appropriately adjusted. Intensive workloads can lead to freezes or slow-downs. When multiple apps are running together in the background, the phones tend to experience lags. The UI animations are also choppy. Keyboard lags were present too. It’s surprising though since Redmi 5 was able to perform better with the same processor. It might be because of ill-optimization of performance. Graphic-intensive games like Asphalt 8 ran almost smoothly on this device with a few occasional lags. The best part of the phone is that it does not get too warm. It gets 3992 points in Geekbench multi-core tests, which is quite decent for entry-level phones. In case of face recognition, the Face Unlock works fast but falters in dim light or bright light situations.

The Honor 7C arrives with a dual-camera module, which has a 13MP primary camera supported by a 2MP depth-sensing camera. Plus, it has an 8MP selfie camera with fixed focus. The camera app is decent but does not have a Pro Mode. The camera is just average. The daylight shots may look modest but closely examining it will reveal the lack of proper details. Low-light performance is abysmal with a lot of noise taken in. The images were grainy. On the other hand, for videos, the footage was average, and there was a lot of focus shifting. In portrait modes, the blur effect was not right and it had poor edge detection.

The 8MP selfie camera produces passable selfies in daylight but produces murky shots when it’s night. The images look a bit artificial and over-processed.

The Honor 7C arrives with a non-removable 3,000mAh battery. It has a decent battery life, but it is not very impressive. In an HD video battery loop test, the phone was able to last for about 10 hours and 40 minutes. Using moderate apps like a bit of gaming, music and video, streaming, and calls found that the phone needed a charge at 10 pm running from 7 am, indicating it can’t keep up for the whole day. Since it does not have fast charging technology, the phone will take about two and a half hours to get from 0 to 100%.

The Honor 7C is well-built, and while it might have some useful features, it does come with inadequate specifications too. The UI is laggy, and the cameras of the phone are mediocre. The performance is partially fine, but pushing it will make it go slow. The only places were Honor 7X stands out is the display and design which cannot be an overall offering of a phone. People should consider Oppo Realme 1, which may lack the fingerprint scanner but is overall a better performer. Redmi Note 5 is better as a value-for-money handset.