Huawei Nova Plus

The Huawei Nova Plus is a classy large-screen Android phone with a number of fine attributes and few outright flaws – however it's easy to see it getting lost in a highly competitive Android mid-range field.

With a price of €499 (around £420 / $550 / AU$740), this isn't quite the top-value contender it could have been. In fact, as the Nova Plus hits the shops it's in real danger of seeming expensive.

For around £100 less you can buy a OnePlus 3 or a Vodafone Smart Platinum 7, both of which boast faster processors, more vibrant displays, and better UIs.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the Huawei Nova Prime out of hand, because it's such a pleasant phone to live with day to day. Evidently still buzzing from the success of the Nexus 6P, Huawei has created a confident, composed, supremely balanced handset.

Just as its pricing makes us cast a glance below at its cheaper rivals, so the overall positive experience of using the Nova Plus causes us to look accusingly at those so-called 'premium' phones positioned above it on the price ladder.

Knocking on the door of royalty

The Huawei Nova Plus is more notable for its lack of glaring weaknesses than for any outstanding features. It's almost the quintessential modern upper-mid-range smartphone, and a strong example of how mature the market is these days.

We're not talking about some carelessly constructed box-ticking exercise here, but rather a phone that genuinely feels equal to – and maybe even slightly better than – the sum of its parts. This slightly intangible quality is a sign that Huawei belongs among the world's elite smartphone makers.

But we deal in tangibles here on TechRadar, so let's list some of the key things that impressed us about the Nova Plus. 

The phone's design, feel and proportions are just right. It sits in the hand as comfortably and assuredly as a phone that sells for £120 / $150 more.

It's also got a truly excellent fingerprint sensor. You might find it difficult to put your finger on what makes a great fingerprint sensor (ha!), but you certainly know it when you use a bad one.

I came to the Huawei Nova Plus from using the Bush E3X Spira; both phones have their fingerprint sensor in the same position on the back of the phone, but the difference in performance is like night and day – although it should be noted that the E3X Spira is half the price of the Huawei.

Whenever I pick up the Huawei and locate the sensor – which is easy to do because it's been sized and recessed just the right amount – it unlocks, almost without fail. It's not the quickest fingerprint unlock system out there, possibly down to the phone's mid-range CPU, but it's extremely reliable.

The Bush phone, in contrast, frequently rejects your initial attempts to unlock it, to the point where you soon start heading straight for the standard pin entry system by default.

That overarching sense of reliability and solidity carries through to the Nova Plus's battery life, which can carry you through a good two days of light-to-moderate usage – more on that later. It's a real trooper.

Design and display

• Quietly classy design
• Display is bright and plenty sharp enough

It's no longer notable when an Android phone comes along with an all-metal unibody design, but the Huawei Nova Plus is no less impressive for the fact.

Not in an ostentatious way, you understand. The Nova Plus won't wow anyone coming from a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge or an HTC 10 – there's nothing so iconic as the former's curvy edges or the latter's angled rear.

But the Nova Plus's fit and finish is definitely in the vicinity of such standard-bearers, excepting the slightly naff plastic antenna panels on the top and bottom portions of the phone's rear. Its subtly rounded sides and familiar bevelled edges sit well in the hand and stand up to close scrutiny, while its 7.3mm thickness and 160g weight draw parallels with the OnePlus 3.

In common with all three of its aforementioned rivals, the Huawei Nova Plus's main camera is positioned in the middle of the body, near the top, so your fingers shouldn't get in the way no matter which way you hold it up.

The phone's power button falls naturally under your right thumb, and its tiny concentric circle ridges help your finger to distinguish it from the smooth, elongated volume rocker just above it.

There's a 3.5mm headphone jack on top (a feature that's suddenly worth mentioning again in this post-iPhone 7 world), while on the bottom you'll find a reversible USB Type-C port for charging and hooking up to a PC, if manual data transfer is still your thing.

Talking of data, the Nova Plus comes with 32GB of internal storage and a microSD slot for expansion, which is about par for the course for a upper-class Android phone these days.

I didn't mention it as a 'key' feature in the previous section, but the Huawei Nova Plus's 5.5-inch IPS LCD display really is a quality component. It's 'only' 1080p, but hopefully we've all come to accept by now that QHD is far from essential when weighing up a top notch smartphone. Outside of VR, the benefits of such a pixel-dense (401ppi) display are pretty negligible.

Indeed, the Nova Plus's display specs are pretty much identical to those of the iPhone 7 Plus and the OnePlus 3 – and few would argue that those screens aren't up to scratch.

The Huawei display gets the essentials right. It's sharp enough, it's reasonably bright, and the colours are accurate and vibrant (for an LCD). Games, videos, and photos look great on it.

Interface and reliability

• Android 6.0 weighed down by EMUI 4.1
• Huawei's custom UI is ugly but smooth

The Huawei Nova Plus runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, with Huawei's own Emotion UI (EMUI) 4.1 layered on top. The former is a good thing, and means the Nova Plus's software is quick and stable, and benefits from advanced app permission settings and the power-saving Doze feature.

However, the presence of EMUI isn't so welcome. It's one of the heavier Android skins out there, needlessly tinkering with a number of Android's signature components.

There's no app drawer here, but that's really not too much of a bind in our experience. Far more irritating is EMUI's rejigged notification and shortcuts menu, which is both uglier and less intuitive than stock Android. It splits the aforementioned functions quite literally between two panes, which must be flipped between with a lateral swipe.

In this and several other respects, Huawei is clearly attempting to recreate iOS on Android. This tendency can also be seen in the universal search function, which is accessed by dragging down in the middle of the home page, as well as in the side-scrolling multitasking menu.

While we prefer stock Android (and iOS, for that matter), we can't fault Huawei on the smoothness or overall clarity of its custom UI. It's all fairly cohesive and pleasant to navigate, we didn't notice any major stutters during general navigation, and it's also quite customisable.

You can alter the number of apps displayed on the home screens, change the home screen transition animations, and play with the way those home screens align themselves.

As on many Chinese devices, it's also possible to tinker with the themes in EMUI. This changes the app icons along with the wallpaper, and there are plenty of alternatives to download from Huawei's own pre-installed Themes app – most of them are pretty naff, though.

Movies, music and gaming

• Strong movie and music performance
• Gaming is a bit of concern thanks to so-so CPU

The Huawei Nova Plus is generally a strong media player, but it's not perfect. On the plus side is its large, well-balanced display, which does equal justice to HD media content and games.

You also get a dedicated video player app positioned prominently on the second home screen, something we don't always see. The app itself is nothing amazing, but it is clear and functional, and it offers the ability to watch videos in a window layered over the home screen, allowing you to navigate and open apps in the background.

On the downside, the phone's solitary bottom-mounted speaker (the one to the left of the USB-C port is a fake) is rather puny. You'll want to make use of the headphone port for anything more than the odd brief YouTube or Facebook video – and this will give you the option to activate the phone's DTS mode, which pumps up the bass.

Of course, you'll need a set of headphones (or a Bluetooth speaker) anyway if you want to play music on the go, to which end you get Google's Play Music app, which is great for playing local content and also for streaming, if you're a subscriber.

You also get Huawei's own Music app for local content, which kind of resembles an old iOS app, but with less polish and zip. It's functional, but there's really no incentive to use it here – especially when you get the same shortcut widgets to the lock screen and notifications menu.

It's gaming where the Huawei Nova Plus falters a little. It's perfectly fine for playing games on, and as I mentioned, that display is perfectly fit for purpose.

However, I have a few concerns about the phone's Snapdragon 625 CPU. It's not a bad mid-range performer, particularly for casual 2D games, but it might not run challenging 3D games at their absolute silky-smooth best – and that's something you can reasonably demand of a phone that costs £420 / $550, especially if you're an avid gamer.

Specs and benchmark performance

• Competent specs and fluid general performance
• Snapdragon 625 is perhaps a little underpowered for a phone of this type

While Huawei's 2016 flagship, the Huawei P9 Plus, runs on a Kirin 955 CPU from company subsidiary HiSilicon, the Chinese manufacturer has opted for a more off-the-shelf mid-range chip for the Huawei Nova Plus.

This phone runs on a Snapdragon 625 CPU, and it's pretty much the only hardware component (along with, perhaps, the camera, which we'll get to shortly) we have cause to question.

It's a perfectly competent mid-range chip, and one we've seen put into several other upper-mid-range phones along the lines of the Nova Plus; the Moto Z Play runs on it, as does the Oppo R7 Plus.

The trouble is, the Snapdragon 625 isn't a particularly strong performer when the going gets tough, even with a decent 3GB of RAM backing it up. The Nova Plus's average Geekbench multicore benchmark score of 3,105 lags way behind the 5,425 returned by the OnePlus 3, which uses a top-end Snapdragon 820. It also trails the Snapdragon 652-powered Vodafone Smart Platinum 7, which scored 5,129.

It's that latter chip, we feel, that would have been a better fit for the Huawei Nova Plus; just-below-the-top performance for a just-below-the-top price.

Not that you'll experience any major hitches in general performance here. As we've already alluded to, flipping through the Nova Plus's home screens is as smooth as you like, while hopping between open apps is similarly swift.

However, you'll notice the performance shortfall when you do things like boot up demanding 3D apps. Starting up Dead Trigger 2 – a favourite test game thanks to its detailed graphics and fast FPS action – I was immediately struck by how long the game, and individual levels, took to load; I thought it had hung at first.

Then, once, I'd gotten into the game, I found that the graphics settings had defaulted to Low. Bumping them up to High resulted in a game that was perfectly playable, though not without the odd stutter.

Again, the Huawei Nova Plus's performance is really nothing to worry about. But when you can get uncompromised performance elsewhere for a good deal less money, it does make you question the phone's value a little.

Battery life

• Larger battery than some rivals
• Huawei's claim of 2.2 days of battery usage seems on the money

Huawei has made some bold claims about the Nova Plus's battery life. It reckons you can get 2.2 days out of a single charge.

That's an oddly specific figure to advertise, which perhaps suggests that the company measured its figure properly, rather than rounding up or down. Certainly, at 3,340mAh the battery is a decent size – a good 11 or 12 percent more capacious than the juice pack in the OnePlus 3 or Vodafone Smart Platinum 7.

Happily, our own use of the phone over a week or so seems to support this optimistic figure.

Reaching the end of a day of moderate usage – around 13 hours since we'd taken the phone off charge – we would have a more-than-healthy 66% left in the tank. We were able to routinely get through two good days of normal usage.

By normal usage, we mean a normal spread of emails, several phone calls and text messages, as well as a little light web browsing and a few minutes of gaming.

The Nova Plus holds up under more intensive usage, too. Ten minutes of playing a graphically intensive 3D game (Vertigo Racing or Dead Trigger 2) would drop the battery level by 3 or 4 percent, which isn't bad at all – in fact it's pretty impressive.

Camera

• Well-specced main camera with OIS and a sharp iOS-inspired UI
• Disappointing results, particularly with close-ups and in low light

The Huawei Nova Plus has a 16-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 aperture lens and optical image stabilisation (OIS). That's the kind of spec you'd expect to see from a phone punching up at the big boys, but it's particularly gratifying to see OIS in particular – and you can see the benefits when shooting video (the resolution goes up to 4k), which is kept nice and steady.

However, given those admirable specs, as well as the Huawei Nova Plus's price tag, and the strong photographic skills of the P9 and P9 Plus before it, we have to admit to being a little bit disappointed with the results we got from the camera.

The snaps we took were generally okay, and given plenty of light they could occasionally rise above okay to decent. But we never felt like we were working with a top-end phone in this department.

It was the little things really, such as the inability to get in close for macro shots. The Nova Plus simply wouldn't focus on close-up subjects, from a scuttling ladybird to a dainty flower and a completely still spider sat on its web.

We also felt let down by some disappointingly noisy, blurry low-light and night shots, and some murky overcast daytime shots. Surely these are areas where OIS should be improving things?

It's also a shame how walled-off the HDR mode is – you have to go into a menu and then select it, at which point the UI flips into HDR mode until you hit a big X button to cancel it.

That HDR mishap is a rare misfire on the camera UI front, though. As with the wider EMUI, Huawei has sought to emulate Apple's camera UI here, which is a smart move, as the iPhone remains the easiest smartphone to point and shoot with.

And Huawei has done a good job, with a familiar drag-to-switch menu for accessing Video, Beauty, Light painting and Time-lapse modes – although I still fail to see the point of the latter three of those. These are positioned just above a clear shutter button, and you also get quick access to a bunch of filters.

The front-facing camera is an 8-megapixel unit, and it's capable of capturing some pretty accomplished selfies. Just leave that weird Beauty mode alone, okay?

Again, though, the UI is arguably the most impressive thing here – we really like the fact that there's an automatic two-second timer, and that this shows up in the corner of a small image preview window right below the front-facing camera, which enables you to preview your selfie while appearing to look straight at the camera. Neat.

For €499 (around £420 / $550 / AU$740), Huawei is aiming surprisingly high with the Huawei Nova Plus. It almost justifies its price point, too, with a classy construction, balanced screen, and high-end components such as a fast fingerprint sensor and image stabilization for the camera.

However, a couple of underwhelming components let the side down. The phone's processor and camera are merely okay, when you really expect them to be hitting a few high notes. Meanwhile Huawei's custom EMUI is smooth, but it remains an inferior diversion from stock Android.

There's nothing inherently bad about the Huawei Nova Plus – it's a very well-put-together piece of kit, and it's a pleasant phone to use day to day. But with cheaper phones like the OnePlus 3 and Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 offering a similar and occasionally superior package for less money, is pleasant enough?

Who's it for?

The Huawei Nova Plus is for those who want that feeling of luxury that comes with a top-end smartphone, but don't want to pay full whack for the privilege.

If you're a light user it's more than up to the task, but power users might want to consider their options.

Should you buy it?

We can't see that anyone would pick up the Huawei Nova Plus and not feel quietly impressed by its general quality. It's got a kind of restrained air of class about it that still isn't all that common with Android phones.

And you'll find little in day to day use that will make you doubt that quality – but that's not really the point here. For the price, you'd expect an accomplished basic experience as a bare minimum.

But you might also expect a class-leading (or thereabouts) processor and a very good camera, and you don't get either here. The OnePlus 3 offers much of what the Nova Plus does, and then some – and it does so for significantly cheaper.

• If you're looking at the Huawei Nova Plus, here are some other phones in the same ballpark that you might want to consider…

OnePlus 3

Android manufacturers have responded to OnePlus's high-value offering in recent years, but the OnePlus 3 shows that the Chinese outfit still has the power to give the big boys a bloody nose; in fact, it's arguably left some of them sprawled on the floor.

The OnePlus 3 is similarly proportioned to the Huawei Nova Plus, and has a similarly premium all-metal build. However, it's got a more vibrant display, a better camera, and a much faster processor paired with double the RAM. All of a sudden, the Huawei looks a little ordinary.

But the final insult here is that the OnePlus 3 costs just £329 / $399. It's bordering on the obscene.

Read our full OnePlus 3 review

Vodafone Smart Platinum 7

It used to be that a network's own-brand smartphone would be a cheap and cheerful effort, for those who aren't really bothered about the phone they carry around. The Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 shows that this needn't be the case.

The UK network's first premium phone lives up to the billing, with an attractive (from some angles) metal build and a vibrant 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display. It's also no slacker on the performance front, with a capable Snapdragon 652 CPU helping it perform well in all tasks.

You also get a near-stock version of Android that, barring a few Vodafone bloatware apps, makes for a more pleasant UI experience than the Huawei Nova Plus offers.

Read our full Vodafone Smart Platinum 7 review

Huawei P9

Here's where Huawei shoots itself in the foot a little. It's already released a well-specced, classily designed all-metal phone in 2016, with a great 5.2-inch 1080p display that's only a little smaller than the one on the Nova Plus.

The Huawei P9 also has a much faster processor than its new sibling, not to mention an excellent dual-lens Leica-endorsed camera.

Most damning of all, given the usual Android handset depreciation, you can currently pick up a Huawei P9 for less than £400.

Read our full Huawei P9 review