Huawei Honor 7 review: Rags to riches

Image gallery

The Huawei Honor 7 may run on an entirely new Android version, but, as already stated, MIUI 3.1 has borrowed a lot of its styling and features from its predecessor. The image gallery is one of them. It still offers a Timeline view, which sorts your images by the date you've taken them. It defaults to the Timeline view, but you can opt for the standard Album view with all of your images sorted in different albums.

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you some basic sharing options (including streaming it over DLNA).

The Gallery app • Viewing an image

You can also go into a more capable editor with options for light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), filters and beauty enhancements (which detects faces automatically).

It is very intuitive and packed with options, including things like filters, effects, levels and even special watermarks for time, location, weather, food and mood. Every teenager would be pleased with the selection.

The image editor is quite capable

Video player

When it came to playing videos, the Huawei Honor 7 default player does a good job supporting every common video codec, but unfortunately it lacks support for AC3 audio as is usually the case with most Android phones anyway.

We couldn't find a way to load subtitles, but Dolby Mobile enhancement is supported. Not much else, however, is available in terms of options and the player seems kind of basic. It still works great though.

Simplistic video player with few options

Music player

The Huawei Honor 7 comes with Huawei's custom music player app. It offers four default playlists - songs, artists, albums, folders. You can create your own playlists, too.

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics. There are no equalizers to speak off, but the app does have a few extra features. It would try to pull album art, song info and lyrics automatically for you.

Another nice little touch is the ability to filter the songs by length, so no pesky ringtones show up in your library.

The Music player

FM radio

The Huawei Honor 7 has a built-in FM receiver. It can play through the headset or the loudspeaker, but you'll need to have the headset plugged in as it serves as an antenna.

We were disappointed not to find RDS support - you'll have to name your radio stations by hand.

The FM Radio also has a notification area shortcut

Audio output is nicely clean, somewhat quiet

The Huawei Honor 7 did pretty well in our audio quality test. It's not the loudest handset around, but its output is among the cleanest around.

When used with an active external amplifier, the Honor 7 delivered excellent scores top to bottom, but only had below average volume levels.

Impressively enough, plugging in a pair of headphones caused next to no degradation - just a barely detectable hike in stereo crosstalk. A feat like that is very hard to achieve and is even beyond the capabilities of many a flagship. The volume levels remained unimpressive though, preventing this one from getting a perfect mark.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Huawei Honor 7	+0.01, -0.06	-92.1	94.2	0.024	0.045	-89.3
Huawei Honor 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.07	-92.4	94.3	0.0067	0.078	-79.6
Vivo X5Max	+0.00, -0.04	-93.4	93.3	0.0012	0.0068	-93.8
Vivo X5Max (headphones attached)	+0.01, -0.11	-93.6	93.4	0.019	0.126	-72.6
Oppo R7	+0.02, -0.02	-93.2	93.1	0.0011	0.054	-94.1
Oppo R7 (headphones attached)	+0.40, -0.38	-92.9	92.8	0.0046	0.191	-56.9
Samsung Galaxy Alpha	+0.01, -0.04	-96.6	92.8	0.0058	0.0091	-97.1
Samsung Galaxy Alpha (headphones attached)	+0.04, -0.01	-95.7	92.7	0.013	0.033	-65.6

Huawei Honor 7 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.