Huawei Honor 7 Smartphone Takes Aim at Your ‘Seven Senses’

Here’s why the Honor 7 smartphone could attract the attention of U.S. buyers when it is made available in the U.S. perhaps as soon as early next year.

If a company wants to build a high-end smartphone, it needs to offer a high-end design. The Honor 7 delivers on that. The device has a full metallic body and comes with a small bezel to reduce its overall footprint. The smartphone comes with a handful of physical buttons, as well as rear-cover “rubber fittings” to safeguard it from possible spills. It’s a great design.

The Honor 7 is based on Android 5.0, but runs Huawei’s EMUI 3.1. According to the company, the overlaid user interface has a “3D Dynamic” feature that creates 3D transitions and effects, and supports a Fast Snapshot option that lets users take a quick photo by double-clicking on the down volume button. For those seeking more privacy, the device also has a feature that lets users hide apps by spreading two fingers apart along the diagonals of the screen.

Audio seems to be a major concern in the Honor 7. In fact, the smartphone comes with a feature called Integrated Audio Plus that the company says will create full, high-fidelity calls. In addition to better-sounding voice quality, the smartphone has a noise-canceling feature that can reduce all noise for up to 10 feet around the device.

The Honor 7 comes with a 5.2-inch full-HD display. While it would have been nice to see a quad-HD screen, the smartphone bundles 423 pixels per inch into the screen and has a respectable contrast ratio of 1,500:1. Overall, its color saturation rate is 85 percent, putting it among the better-performing smartphones for color accuracy.

The Honor 7 comes with an interesting add-on that may prove appealing to some customers: an infrared chip capable of controlling everything from televisions and cable set-top boxes to smartphone. Users need only to match their third-party devices to the IR codes bundled with the Honor 7 and they’ll be good to go.

A Smart Key offered with the Honor 7 is designed to create a truly “smart” user experience, the company says. The button, which sits on the device’s spine, allows users to preset app access and shortcut functions to it. So, a single tap may open one app, while two taps may open another. A long press gives users access to Google Search and Google Voice.

The vast majority of smartphones run on chips made by Qualcomm. The Honor 7, though, is a little different. The smartphone comes with a 64-bit Hisilicon Kirin 935 processor running at a clock speed of 2.2GHz. The octa-core processor is complemented by 3GB of onboard RAM.

The Honor 7 has solid battery life, allowing so-called “light users” to do whatever they want on the device for a period of 2.6 days before needing to recharge. “Heavy users” (the company doesn’t define either type of user) will need to recharge their devices every 1.2 days. A quick-charge feature has also been added, letting users charge 50 percent of the 3,100mAh battery in just 30 minutes. Five minutes’ worth of charging adds one hour to phone call time.

Considering how important snapping photos with smartphones has become, the Honor 7’s camera technology could be a selling point. The rear-facing camera comes with a 20-megapixel, “ultra-high-resolution” Sony-made sensor that can focus within 0.1 seconds. On the front, the Honor 7 comes with an 8-megapixel selfie-friendly camera, featuring a 26mm wide-angle lens and 10 different picture “modes” depending on what kind of picture is being snapped.

The Honor 7 is being offered to customers in China, and there is currently no U.S. availability. However, during a question-and-answer session with reporters in mid-December, Honor CEO George Zhao hinted that his company will be in attendance at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and could announce that the Honor 7 will be available stateside soon after. It’s unknown how much the Honor 7 would cost or exactly when it’ll be available, but at least right now, all signs point to the device being unveiled in the U.S. early next year.