Huawei Nova Plus
Huawei is going from strength to strength in the UK, with releases including the flagship Huawei P9 proving popular. It’s latest release is the Nova Plus, a 5.5in Android Marshmallow smartphone.
Design
As you can see from our photo (right) this is a premium device. It has curved 2.5D glass, small bezels and a metal unibody. The camera protrudes from the back of the Nova Plus, underneath which is a fingerprint scanner.
The phone has a 5.5in display (more on this later), although you wouldn’t be able to tell when holding it in the hand. Huawei uses small bezels to fit a larger display into a smaller-than-usual chassis measuring 151.8x75.7x7.3mm. This makes it smaller and easier to hold than Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, which also has a 5.5in display but measures 158.2x77.9x7.3mm. This means it’s comfortable to hold for extended periods and it’s easy to use one-handed.
The Nova Plus is a gorgeous device, with the a brushed metal finish on the sides and rear. All the small details, from the slightly curved unibody to the different finishes on different parts of the chassis, provide the look and feel of a high-end, premium smartphone.
Display
The Full HD screen is bright, crisp and vibrant. It also has a blue light filter that’s designed to make using the smartphone in the evenings easier on the eye. In testing, however, we found it to be a little too aggressive for our liking, leaving a noticeably orange hue on our display when activated. We prefer Apple’s Night Shift offering, which provides similar effects without having a noticeably orange display.
Hardware
Inside the Nova Plus, users will find a Snapdragon 625 processor coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which can be expanded thanks to the ‘Hybrid SIM tray’ that allows you to use either one SIM and a microSD card, or two SIMs at once.
While we found that the Nova Plus was snappy when browsing Google Play and scrolling through Twitter, it stuttered when trying to multi-task (switching between apps quickly, and so on) and also when trying to play 3D games. Basic 3D platformers such as Faily Breaks perform fine, but the phone can’t handle graphically intense mobile games. Other mid-range smartphones, such as the OnePlus 3, perform better when it comes to gaming.
Huawei was quick to point out that the included Snapdragon 625 processor provides users with around 30 percent better battery life than the Snapdragon 615, and when that’s coupled with a large 3340mAh battery, the company claims that the phone will last 2.2 days on average. To compare, Apple’s similarly-sized iPhone 7 Plus features a 2900mAh battery, 440mAh less than Huawei’s Nova Plus. Despite Huawei’s claims, we’re yet to experience a full 2.2 days of charge with standard use – it’ll get you through a day comfortably, but usually requires charging at some point during the second day.
Performance
To measure the Nova Plus’s performance, we ran a number of benchmark tests. The first of these, Geekbench 4, measures a phone’s processing power. The Huawei scored 848 in single-core mode, and 3177 in multi-core mode, a disappointing score when compared to the similarly-priced Xiaomi Redmi Pro, which scored 1764 and 4539, respectively. Huawei’s processor is fine for day-to-day tasks, but there are certainly more powerful handsets on the market.
GFXBench, tests a smartphone’s graphical power and how well (or not) it can handle gaming. Unfortunately, the results were not good. The Nova Plus scored 23fps in T-Rex and 10fps in Manhattan, whereas the £329 OnePlus 3 managed 59- and 46fps respectively. As you can see there are much better options out there.
Our final benchmark is
Tapping on the screen gets the camera to quickly focus on the photo’s subject, even when positioned extremely close to the phone
JetStream. This tests the speed of a phone’s built-in browser which, in the case of the Nova Plus, is Google Chrome. While iOS devices run faster than Android counterparts (the iPhone 7 scored 160.2, while the Samsung Galaxy S7 recorded 61), it’s interesting to see that even among Android devices, browser speeds can vary. That said, Huawei’s handset scored 30.2, a distinctly average score for a mid-range Android smartphone.
Cameras
The Nova Plus has a rear-facing 16Mp camera and uses Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), to help capture sharper photos.
During testing, we found that while our shots looked impressive when viewed on the phone itself, it was a different story when looking at them on a Mac. Zooming in to 100 percent (1:1 pixels) revealed a lack of fine detail, possibly due to aggressive noise cancellation. It’s not a huge deal, but we wouldn’t crop photos taken on the Nova Plus.
What the camera does do well is take photos quickly. Most cars in our test shot of St. Pancras (below left) were moving when the picture was taken, though you can’t tell. General colour reproduction is good, too.
Macro photography is also decent for a mid-range smartphone. Tapping on the screen gets the camera to quickly focus on the photo’s subject, even when positioned extremely close to the phone. In the case of the bottomright photo, the Nova Plus easily grabbed the focus of the closest leaf, allowing us to clearly see the finer details. While the focus could have been slightly improved, we feel this is more a reflection on our photography skills, rather than that of the smartphone.
On the flip side, the Nova Plus has an 8Mp front-facing camera, which is fine for taking selfies and performs well in low-light conditions, but won’t light up dark conditions – for those, users have the option of using the 5.5in display as a forward-facing flash.
To test out the phone’s video capabilities, we recorded a small video clip in 1080p at 30fps (it goes up to 4K at 30fps) and walked a few steps. When watching it back, despite the video being clear and decent quality, we noticed visible shakiness from each step we took. When compared to the software-enabled OIS of the iPhone 6s, Apple’s handset wins hands down.
Software
The Nova Plus comes with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and Huawei’s own Emotion UI (EMUI). If you are a fan of Google’s OS, you should note that this is about as far removed from stock Android as you can get since Huawei has tweaked almost every element of the interface. Although this may be slightly controversial, we love EMUI – it looks good and offers functionality not available on standard Android devices, such as tapping the screen to take a screenshot and being able to view your notifications in a timeline-esque view. Yes, it may take some time to get used to, but we feel that the learning curve is worth it. There’s no word yet as to when, or even if, the OS will be updated to Android Nougat.
Verdict
While the Huawei Nova Plus looks the part, with a premium design and a bright, crisp display, its internals let it down. Despite featuring a 16Mp camera with OIS, the photos are distinctly average. We could, however, look past the camera if it wasn’t for the sub-par CPU and GPU, which produce disappointing results when compared to other mid-range Android handsets. While the Nova Plus isn’t a terrible phone, there are better options on the market.