Budget smartphone with a flagship look
The Huawei Nova 3e is a weaker but equally attractive version of the company’s flagship P20 Pro model.
For people who want to get 80% of what Huawei’s best phone of 2018 can do at 40% of the price, look no further.
In a nutshell, this phone is very similar to Huawei’s 2018 top-of-the-line phone, the P20 Pro, in most aspects (like design, colour, screen and software), but it is considerably slower in CPU speed compared to its older sibling. Hence, it is also known as the Huawei P20 Lite in many countries.
If shiny things are your cup of tea, the flashy, glimmery, blue back panel that reflects light like aurora stripes will please your eyes immensely, just like the P20 Pro does.
A glass back with a metal frame and an infamous notch at the top (which can be kind of turned off by turning black bars on its sides — this function is included with Huawei’s EMUI) is the design that Huawei chose to stick to for the whole of 2018 it seems. And this Huawei Nova 3e follows suit.
Even though the Nova 3e is lacking proper branded camera lenses, it can take sharp vivid photos very snappily, thanks to a built-in photo-taking AI which helps to determine the “supposedly” best setting for the scene by adjusting white balance, ISO, f-stop scale and many other things. Too bad, however, that taking photos of low-light scenes will not live up to the P20 Pro’s par.
With its two rear lenses, it can do the bokeh effect (focusing on a main object while blurring the background) nicely. The photos that this phone can produce will be more than good enough for digital use, like posting on social media. Printing on posters might be out of its league though.
Also, amazingly, photo processing time, which usually happens right when taking photos, is pretty much zero here. Most mid-range phones usually take something like a half second to process and save the taken photo. With this phone, you will not notice that at all.
The camera app has plenty of settings and presets for you to twiddle with, although that pertains only to taking photos and can’t be said for the video function.
Selfie lovers will appreciate the 24MP frontal camera, which also comes with an aggressive beautify adjustment.
The HUAWEI Kirin 659 CPU this phone runs on can adequately power trend games such as Garena RoV and Seven Knights. The Nova 3e’s downside is the quality of its speakers, its mediocre battery capacity and a lack of water resistance.