Honor 7X launched with 5.93-inch full view display

HONOR, Huawei’s sub-brand mostly offering midrange smartphones, has announced its newest device, the Honor 7X, which follows last year’s Honor 6X. There’s some good news and bad news.

The biggest change, obviously, is the humongous screen. Honor has managed to cram a 5.93-inch “FullView” 2,160 x 1080p display into the body of a 5.5-inch phone. For a midrange device to jump into bezelless trend, commonly found on flagships the likes of Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone X, that’s impressive. It’s the star of the show here, really, because the rest of the device is decent at best.

There’s a fingerprint scanner, yes, and the phone is enclosed in a premiumlooking metal shell, but there’s no NFC reader, a tentpole feature for cashless transactions. There’s also no USB Type-C port, as the phone still comes with the ancient microUSB 2.0. Just par for the course, though, as the Honor 6X before it came with the same thing.

The specs sheet remains largely unchanged, with the most significant change being the more powerful Kirin 659 instead of the Kirin 655 found on the Honor 6X. It comes with 4 GB of RAM, up to 128 GB of space, and uses the SIM 2 slot for expandable storage.

The dual cameras on the back adopt a different system than most dual camera setups on other flagships. While on some there’s one standard and one wide-angle or one standard and one monochromatic, the Honor 7X has one 16-megapixel colour sensor paired with a 2-megapixel monochrome lens with phase detection autofocus — purely for capturing lighting and depth information. Apparently, that data is enough to improve contrast in lowlight situations, and it’s supposed to help add digital bokeh to portraits as well.