Android 7 Nougat with EMUI 5.1 is a combination we've seen time and time again in both Huawei's and Honor's ranks. In that regard, there is nothing special or unexpected about it. However, that should not be misconstrued as criticism against the company's UX. In fact, Emotion UI is constantly getting better, with behind-the-scenes improvements, like better RAM management, improved miss-touch detection and higher touch accuracy, to name a few.
Plus, we appreciate the constantly shrinking amount of bloat, bundled in the ROM (although, there is still fat to trim) and the number and convenience of the baked-in features.
Home screen and panels, without an app drawer
For instance, you don't have to be stuck with or without an app drawer. EMUI offers both and switching between them only takes a few seconds. You can be as organized or disorderly as you want.
Enabling the app drawer takes a few seconds
And there are some other launcher options to explore as well, ranging from layout arrangement, to more advanced search and suggestion features. You can also swap the navigation bar controls to match your preferences. Honor didn't skip on a theme engine either and you have a rich selection of free themes in the online store.
Launcher settings • Navigation bar settings • Theme engine and store
Speaking of neat advanced features not necessarily found in cheaper devices, the Honor 7X has a split screen mode. It is a pretty good way to make use of the extra screen height, but we can't fail to complain about the still limited app support for the feature.
Notification and battery management
And while we're on the topic of convenient extra accessibility perks, EMUI has a few other notable ones. In no particular order, these include a powerful notification and battery managers, some gestures, quick access floating controls, one-handed UI and even app twins (only for a limited number of supported apps, though).
Smart assistance • Floating dock • Motion control • One-handed UI • App twin
We realize the parallels are getting kind of repetitive, but can't avoid referencing the Mate 10 Lite yet again. It already offered some benchmark numbers and painted a pretty decent and usable picture for the Kirin 659 chipset. It is more of the same with the Honor 7X. Its scores are pretty much the same (within margin of error).
That being said, you can expect pretty similar conclusions. The Kirin 659 has a total of four Cortex-A53 cores. Four of those take the heavy lifting and work at 2.36GHz, while the other four take care of less power-intensive tasks while ticking at 1.7GHz.
Higher is better
Higher is better
These actually handle number-crunching quite decently. We decided to post the older GeekBench 4 scores here for comparison purposes with slightly older devices in our database, like the Helio-X20 Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. The newer version of the benchmark paints an almost identical story. You can pretty much expect CPU performances slightly above the Snapdragon 625 and slightly below the Helio P20 and Snapdragon 630.
Higher is better
This looks about as expected for the 100Mhz clock speed bump over the older Kirin 658 (Huawei P10 Lite). However, we do have to mention that we don't exactly appreciate the absence of 5GHz Wi-Fi in this chip. Other than that, its 16nm fabrication process isn't quite as efficient as Qualcomm's increasingly popular 14nm one, but still provides enough wiggle room for the Honor 7X to run cool and remain throttle-free under loads.
Higher is better
Overall, paired with 4GB of RAM (as in our review unit), as well as 3GB, the Kirin 659 definitely delivers in everyday workloads. Unfortunately, the same can't be said when you add GPU rendering tasks to the mix.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Now, to be fair, Huawei and its HiSilicon chipset division have come a long way since the old days of integrating what seemed like a tiny person with a pencil to churn out pixels.
However, there are only two Mali-T830 cores inside the Honor 7X and those really struggle with modern graphics loads.
Higher is better
Still, to be fair, most of its competitors in this or similar price brackets don't really have it much better. That is, not counting some odd exception, like the severely depreciated HTC U Ultra.
If you are really into mobile gaming, then a recent Qualcomm chipset might be able to provide slightly better graphical fidelity for your buck. It is also worth noting that unlike the deliberately tasking synthetic tests, real-world game engines have become increasingly optimized, so you shouldn't loose too much sleep over the GPU aspect of things.
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