Honor 7S

It seems Honor won’t stop until it has a phone representing every incremental price point up to £400 (around $550/AU$720). The Honor 7S has arrived to anchor a range that includes the Honor 7A, the Honor 7X and the Honor 7C.

Entering the market at just £99 (around $130 / AU$180, but not currently available in the US or Australia), the Honor 7S looks to strip things back even further than the £140 / $185 / AU$250 Honor 7A did.

Given that we criticized that handset for cutting a little too deep in its bid for bargain status, it’s interesting to see how much further the Huawei sub-brand can go.

Of course, the Honor 7S isn’t alone in attempting to create a usable smartphone for so little money. Just recently we’ve seen Vodafone make another creditable effort to do something along these lines with the Vodafone Smart N9 - and very nearly getting away with it.

Sadly, the Honor 7S doesn’t get anywhere near as close to hitting its target. Just like with the 7A, we have to question whether cheap equates with good value here.

An audio-visual extravaganza?

• Doesn't live up to claims of clearer calls
• Has a trendy 18:9 display

That tiny price tag might be the main story, but Honor clearly wants the Honor 7S hardware to make itself heard. Quite literally, in fact.

The Honor 7S web page leads with the heading, 'View more, hear clearer'. The latter portion of that quote is a reference to the phone’s literally named Larger Receiver Volume feature.

Apparently, the Honor 7S will provide clearer listening in noisy environments, and will adjust the volume of the call according to your environment. In practice, we couldn’t tell much of a difference to any other cheap phone.

Calls seemed plenty loud enough, yes, but not noticeably different from other handsets at and around this price. Indeed, at the other end of our calls, we had complaints that the call quality was a little off, and that it sounded like we had put them on loudspeaker.

This is far from a scientific test, of course, and we can’t rule out network issues here. But the main point to note is that Honor’s claims of boosted audio don’t hold an awful lot of practical weight.

As for the 'view more' side of the headline, this is a reference to the Honor 7S’s FullView Display. We’ve seen plenty of front-filling 18:9 aspect ratio displays further up the smartphone food chain, but they're also starting to seep into the lower end of the market.

The rest of the Honor 7 range has a similar feature, but it’s not exactly unique around the £100/$130 mark either. The aforementioned Vodafone Smart N9 also packs an expansive 18:9 display.

Still, there remain plenty of phones that launch with chunky borders, and while the Honor 7S is hardly bezel-less, its roughly 73% screen-to-body ratio is nothing to be sniffed at.

Design

• Solid all-plastic build
• Lack of fingerprint sensor is a major omission

Honor has stuck with a similar design approach to the more expensive Honor 7A for the Honor 7S. That means a fairly bland slab of plastic with a deep metallic shade of blue chosen for the back and (thankfully non-reflective) sides. It also comes in black or gold.

The front of the phone is an all-glass affair, with a black border surrounding the display. As already mentioned, it’s not what you’d call a bezel-less design, but the phone’s forehead and chin aren’t too prominent.

This certainly isn’t a handsome phone, but nor is it garish or tacky looking. That’s about all you can ask for in such a cheap smartphone. The surprisingly sharp Vodafone Smart N9 is the exception that proves the rule here.

More important than the looks of such a phone is how it feels and handles, and on that front we have no qualms whatsoever. Honor knows how to build solid hardware on a budget by now, and the 7S is largely free of creak and flex.

There’s a nice weight of 142g to the phone, which stops it from feeling too fly-away or disposable. Despite this, it’s perfectly easy to hold in one hand, thanks to dimensions of 146.5 x 70.9mm and a thickness of 8.3mm, which is not far off the iPhone X.

The side buttons are clicky and easy enough to locate, though we would have liked some kind of texture to the power button to help differentiate it from the volume rocker.

There are two external design omissions that let you know in no uncertain terms that this is an ultra-cheap smartphone, and one of those is potentially fatal here in 2018. There’s no fingerprint scanner.

We’ve surely gotten to the point now where biometric access is expected, even at the lower end of the market. Both the aging Wileyfox Swift 2 and the new Vodafone Smart N9 have one, to name just two similarly priced examples.

Maybe we burn through too many phones, but we found that switching to the Honor 7S required a major rewiring of the brain. Even after spending some time with the phone, we often noticed a slight pause in our mental processing when we picked it up and fished around for an unlock mechanism.

We’re used to being able to unlock our phones securely with a touch or a look now, and having that taken away feels like a major step backwards. That’s not even to mention the implications for mobile payments. Coupled with a lack of NFC, Google Pay is a no-no.

The other external omission here is USB-C. The modern reversible connection standard has been bypassed in favor of the older micro USB standard, though this is still pretty common in cheaper phones.

Screen

• Bright 5.45-inch FullView display
• 720 x 1440 resolution

The Honor 7S is another budget phone to receive the FullView display treatment. This means that it has been stretched out to an 18:9 aspect ratio rather than the more traditional 16:9.

We’ll discuss what this means in media terms a little later (spoiler alert: not as much as you’d think), but the true purpose of these longer screens is to improve the screen-to-body ratio of the phone.

In the old days, a 5.5-inch phone would be a pocket-filling monstrosity. Here in the 18:9 era with taller and slimmer screens, they’re far more wieldy, and the Honor 7S is no different.

The screen itself is a 5.45-inch LCD with a 720 x 1440 resolution. That equates to 720p, with the extra pixels accounting for the extra height.

No, it’s not the ideal resolution for a screen of this size. We would have much preferred 1080p. But in a phone of this price, it’s more or less to be expected. 

Both the aforementioned Wileyfox Swift 2 and the Smart N9 go with 720p, so it’s clearly a bit of a red line if you’re seeking to build a balanced £100/$130 smartphone.

It’s a perfectly acceptable compromise too, as it turns out. The Honor 7S display obviously isn’t the best screen we’ve ever seen, but it’s reasonably balanced, not too washed out, and it gets nice and bright.

The screen is plenty sharp enough for practical day to day tasks too. Web browsing - arguably the best all-round test for such things - is perfectly pleasant, though you do notice the relative lack of pixels in thumbnail images and smaller text.

Battery life

• 3,020mAh battery is ample
• No USB-C or fast charging

The Honor 7S packs a 3,020mAh battery, which is rather large for a phone with such modest specs. Many flagship Android phones have 3,000mAh batteries, but they pack QHD displays, speedy chipsets and advanced cameras.

You’d expect the Honor 7S to last through a full day, then, and indeed it does. Comfortably so, in fact. If you have a particularly light day you’ll probably get through a good portion of a second day too.

Even if you do hit the videos hard, though, the Honor 7S holds up reasonably well. During our standard battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute 720p looping video with the screen brightness set to full, the Honor 7S lost 16% of its charge on average.

That’s significantly better than the Vodafone Smart N9, which lost 24% in the same test. In fact, it’s only very slightly worse than the Nokia 2 (on 15%), and that phone has a freakishly large 4,100mAh battery.

It’s a good job the Honor 7S has such decent stamina, because it doesn’t have any sort of fast charging standard to fall back on. As we’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t use the modern USB-C charging standard either.

Camera

• 13MP rear camera is slow but can produce decent shots
• 5MP front camera with dedicated LED

Honor has eschewed the increasingly popular dual-camera setups that are around at the moment in favor of a single 13MP unit. It’s probably a wise choice in the interest of minimizing that price tag.

While it’s far from perfect, the Honor 7S's camera is capable of reasonable results if you feed it enough light. It’s certainly better than the Vodafone Smart N9's camera we tested recently.

The camera performance is undoubtedly slow, though, and you need to wait patiently for it first to find its focus and then to take its shot. But if you give the camera the necessary attention, you might find yourself surprised by the pictures you can take.

On a bright sunny day we were able to take some effective street snaps, as well as a detailed close-up of some flowers. Conversely, when we tried to take a rushed snapshot of a static street scene, it came out a little blurry. 

There’s also the usual tendency to overexpose bright areas, which is common in cheaper phones.

For such shots you’ll need to activate the HDR mode manually, but this is horrendously placed in a completely hidden swipe-up menu. When that menu does appear, it’s curiously locked into a portrait orientation. Sloppy.

The quality of those HDR photos can make up for the inconvenience of accessing them - provided you’re not in a rush. And that your subject isn’t moving. Yep, it’s another element of the Honor 7S’s camera (and indeed the phone in general) that takes a while to process.

Shots with anything less than decent lighting are more or less a write-off on the Honor 7S, though. They’re guaranteed to be poorly focused and full of noise. But of course, you’d expect that from a budget smartphone.

At first glance, the Honor 7S’s front-facing camera looks like a fairly basic 5MP unit. You’d be right, and you’ll also have to contend with Honor’s horrible beauty setting that smudges out your facial blemishes. But there is one interesting addition.

This is a rare smartphone that includes a dedicated LED flash for the selfie camera. Or rather, an LED light. When the 7S detects that it’s dark, it will turn the LED on to try and brighten up the shot.

It’s a neat idea, but in practice, if the light levels have dropped to the extent that you need this feature, you won’t be getting good results. All of the selfies we took with this LED were a blurry, noisy mess - just with a slightly sickly glow.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Android 8.1 with EMUI 8.0
• Lots of bloatware

The Honor 7S comes with Android 8.1 Oreo, which is about as up to date as Google’s mobile operating system gets right now.

On the other hand, you get Huawei’s custom EMUI 8.0 layered over the top. And that doesn’t feel particularly fresh at all.

While Huawei is working with Android as its base, it’s clearly a big fan of Apple’s work with iOS. You can see it right there in the look and layout of EMUI’s rounded-square icons and its Settings menu, as well as in the lack of an app tray.

The latter can be changed in the Settings menu if you prefer the traditional Android method, but Huawei and Honor have clearly set their stall out as an iOS emulation effort.

While EMUI 8.0 is perfectly functional, though, it’s not half as stylish or polished as either iOS or stock Android. There’s a certain garishness to its bold colors, and a cheapness to its menus and buttons.

There’s a Themes app here that lets you customize the look of your home screen, but that doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as comprehensive or filled out here as it is in other Honor phones. This is something of a mixed blessing: while most of the available themes tended to be awful, it was nice to have the choice.

Another way in which choice has been lessened for the Honor 7S is in terms of Face Unlock. Honor’s facial recognition system was available on the almost-as-cheap Honor 7A, and worked fairly well (though it wasn’t particularly secure). 

That’s not even an option here, though, and it’s arguably missed even more in the absence of a fingerprint scanner.

One thing that we do approve of is the provision of the facility formerly known as Google Now (now known rather generically as ‘the feed’) with a leftward swipe from the home screen.

It’s a little sad that this has started to become a jumped up news stream rather than a personalized information hub, but it’s still better than any number of custom news and universal search services that tend to be positioned here.

This being an Honor phone, You get the inevitable round of bloatware as standard. In the Games folder, you’ll get half a dozen fairly forgettable Gameloft titles, while Top Apps includes Netflix, eBay (both of which we’ll let slide), and Booking.com (which we won’t).

Facebook is placed right there on the home screen as standard, which will either please or horrify you depending on your present feelings towards the social network.

You also get a batch of Huawei’s own apps, many of which duplicate or replace much better Google equivalents. We’re talking specifically about Music, Gallery, Calendar, Clock and Email.

The Tools folder contains ten little kind-of-useful apps such as Calculator, Sound Recorder and Torch. There’s also an FM Radio in there for those who want to do their music listening in an old school style.

Oh, and the Honor app is essentially a link to a mobile-optimized regional Honor website. Which means it’s a bit of a waste of time and space.

Movies, music and gaming

• Big bright screen is good for media, though low-res
• Meagre 16GB of storage

The price and marketing of the Honor 7S tells you that it’s being targeted at a youthful crowd, so how it handles media is pretty important.

We streamed video from a variety of sources (YouTube, Amazon Prime Video) and also downloaded them from Google Play to try and get a rounded impression of how it might perform. The handset acquitted itself very well, with smooth playback and no stuttering.

While this video content isn’t as sharp as you may be accustomed to - there’s no Full HD playback here - the Honor 7S’s display is nice and bright, and the colors are surprisingly vibrant. We’re obviously not talking OLED levels, but the reds certainly pop nonetheless.

One thing that doesn’t really play as much of a part as you might be expecting is the screen’s 18:9 aspect ratio. Precious little video content is actually shot and distributed in this format, so you’ll need to get used to black borders on either side.

The alternative, as presented by YouTube, is to zoom in with a pinch motion and remove those borders. But as that cuts off top and bottom portions of the video, we’re not huge fans of that approach.

Games fare much better, as they’re generally optimized to run in the extra-wide format. There’s a tangible benefit to running them at 18:9, particularly when on-screen virtual controls are involved, as your hands obscure less of the action.

You only get a single speaker here, but at least it’s front-facing, meaning you can’t cover it up too easily while you’re holding the phone. There’s a BesLoudness toggle in the settings that amplifies things quite well, but we’re not entirely sure why it’s even an option.

Either way, you’re much better of utilizing the top-mounted 3.5mm socket - just about the only hardware advantage these cheap phones have over their more expensive counterparts these days.

One major restriction here, however, is a severe lack of internal storage. At just 16GB of storage - and with 6GB of that given over to Android - there’s really not much to play with for the media enthusiast.

Fortunately, there’s a microSD card slot for expansion purposes. You’re going to need it.

Specs and benchmark performance

• MediaTek MT6739 CPU is very poor
• Underwhelming benchmarks and general performance

Many budget smartphones are undone by at least one hardware failing, and in the case of the Honor 7S it’s a matter of performance.

Put simply, the phone’s 1.5GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6739 CPU just isn’t up to the task. Backing this poor chipset up with just 2GB of RAM doesn’t help matters either.

This is a similar setup (albeit the 7S is seemingly clocked a little faster) to the Vodafone Smart N9, and performance was by far the biggest flaw with that phone too.

Stutters and sluggishness pervade the Honor 7S experience, from the moment you bring up the password unlock screen - and wait excruciating moments for it to unlock - to the halting experience of simply flicking between home screens or through menus.

When it comes to gaming, the usually forgiving Guns of Boom runs absolutely awfully on the Honor 7S. As in, it’s virtually unplayable.

Our Geekbench 4 tests yielded an average multi-core score of 1,819, which pitches the phone slightly above the Smart N9 on 1,628 (perhaps down to that faster clock speed) but well below the Wileyfox Swift 2 on 2,545.

2017s Moto G5, which can be snagged for only a little more money than the Honor 7S these days, also outperforms it with 2,377. This phone is not a strong performer at all.

Verdict

For £100 (around $130 / AU$180), the Honor 7S provides a solidly built smartphone with a nice bright display.

Its camera, while sluggish and a little fiddly to use, can also take some decent pictures if you really work with it.

However, the phone performs frustratingly badly, and the lack of a fingerprint scanner is a major omission in 2018. Elsewhere, Huawei’s custom EMUI - and all the bloatware that accompanies it - continues to be an unattractive dilution of Android.

Who’s this for?

The Honor 7S is aimed at a young and cash-poor audience. Little features like an LED light for the front camera and a big bright display will clearly appeal to that very market.

There aren’t many smartphones available for so little these days, and Honor is clearly willing to take risks with some of its hardware cuts in order to meet that need.

Should you buy it?

Any phone that offers a solidly built chassis, a big bright display and a fairly competent camera for so little money is surely destined for success - or so you would think.

Unfortunately, the Honor 7S spoils its good start with appalling performance and the omission of a fingerprint scanner. It also continues to suffer for the inclusion of Huawei’s sub-par EMUI, while whipping that camera into shape takes considerable patience.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that £100/$130 is perhaps too cheap to get a fully rounded smartphone in 2018. Spend 50% to 70% more and you’ll have a much happier experience all round.

There are plenty of other budget options, such as the following three:

Vodafone Smart N9

The Vodafone Smart N9 is a similarly priced but much better-looking phone than the Honor 7S. It also benefits from a cleaner and more pleasant take on Android 8.1 Oreo, not to mention a fingerprint scanner.

Under its stylish exterior, however, the N9 is similarly under-powered to the Honor 7S, with fairly woeful performance dragging the package down.

Its camera, meanwhile, is a bit of a mess. And of course, you’ll need to be on Vodafone to use the phone, which restricts its appeal further.

• Read our full Vodafone Smart N9 review

Wileyfox Swift 2

The Wileyfox Swift 2 is getting on a bit now, as can be seen with the suddenly out-of-date 16:9 aspect ratio of its display.

That aside, the Swift 2 remains a compelling package at a newly reduced price. It’s a much better performer than the Honor 7S, thanks to the use of a more mainstream Snapdragon 430 chipset.

It also has a fingerprint scanner and a much cleaner version of Android, not to mention a surprisingly snappy camera.

• Read our full Wileyfox Swift 2 review

Moto G5

Shop around online (you won’t have to look far) and you’ll find 2017's Moto G5 for a price not too far in excess of the Honor 7S.

It’s flat out a much better phone, too, with a part-metal design, a sharper display, a superior camera and a fingerprint scanner.

You also get a near-stock version of Android, which is way nicer to use than the Honor 7S’s EMUI.

• Read our full Moto G5 review

First reviewed: July 2018