Huawei Nova

An impressive phone – but should it really cost this much?

When we tested this phone after Huawei announced it in September, we found a very nicely designed device at what looked like a very reasonable cost. So far, though, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the larger Nova Plus model in the UK, while the Nova is only available from Carphone Warehouse (for about £60 more than we expected). Unless this price comes down, the Nova will look more like an attractive mid-range phone with something approaching a high-end price tag that’s not worth the extra money.

That’s a shame, because it has a lot going for it. With its simple design, rounded-off glass and shiny chamfered edges, the case looks a bit like an iphone SE crossed with an iphone 6. The fingerprint sensor button is round the back, which reminded us of the Nexus 6P, made by Huawei for Google. These are all excellent phones, so no complaints there.

Full HD (1920x1080 pixels) on the 5in screen looks very sharp, and with high contrast and almost perfectly accurate colour reproduction the AMOLED panel’s only shortcoming is brightness levels, which we didn’t find a serious problem. The eight-core Snapdragon processor ran Huawei’s version of Android 6.0.1.0.1 smoothly, even coping well with 3D games, and the battery lasted us 13-and-a-half hours of video playback.

If there’s a weak spot, it’s the 12megapixel rear camera, which looks good on paper but gave us disappointing pictures outdoors. The Nova Plus has optical stabilisation, but Huawei has left it out of the standard version, making camera shake more of a problem. Indoors, surprisingly, it was better than some of its rivals.

This is a decent phone, then, but at £400 itit’s directly up against the new Oneplus 3T (£399 from Oneplus www.snipca.com/22547), which improves on an alalready excellent Android phone with longer battery life, a faster processor and a better camera. It seems like the better buy unless the Nova drifts down in price.

★★★★☆

VERDICT: In today’s competitive phone market, the Nova needs to be cheaper, but it’s a fine device with no big drawbacks

ALTERNATIVE: Oneplus 3T £399 This 5.5in phoneone comes with 64GB of storage (though no microsd slot) andnd a more powerful processor