From the very first day I saw the Huawei Ascend P7, I’ve fallen in love with it. What I fell in love with mostly is the design. Not that the physical design is extraordinary in any way though, its design looks like a rip off from Apple’s playbook. If someone sees you with the P7 from a distance, they’ll think it’s an Apple phone they’re looking at.
Huawei isn’t another small company trying to build a mobile phone brand from a humble beginning. They’ve been in the device and mobile telecommunication equipment business for a while with most of the Internet dongles sold by Nigerian telcos made by Huawei. They’re a very big company. However, they only recently started playing big and selling in more markets outside of China. Their smartphones run on Google’s Android Operating System.
The Huawei Ascend P7 is about a year in the market now, but it still rocks. Besides, I am only just able to lay my hands on one to review.
Brief Specification
- Weight – 124g
- SIM – Micro-SIM
- DISPLAY IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
- Size – 1080 x 1920 pixels, 5.0 inches (~441 ppi pixel density)
- Operating System – Android 4.4.2 KitKat
- Chipset – HiSilicon Kirin 910T
- CPU – Quad-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A9
- Camera Rear – 13 MP, 4160 x 3120 pixels, autofocus, LED flash,
- Camera Front – 8 MP
Design
Huawei Ascend P7 supports a micro SIM and a micro SD card. There’s a pin packed along with the whole package that can be used to pop open the SIM and micro SD card tray. To wake up the phone once it is asleep, you need to touch the power button to the right. The volume rocker is to the right as well. There’s nothing on the left.
The 3.5mm audio port is at the top of the phone while the charging port is at the button of the phone. With ease, my right hand can reach the volume rocker and the power button with one hand.
It supports low energy Bluetooth connection (Bluetooth 4.0) and it is spotting a USB 2.0.
Software
Google’s Android has been modified by Huawei on the P7. Once you start up the phone and look at the icons, you’ll spot this difference. The default keyboard—Huawei Swype—is a customisation of the Swype keyboard by Huawei. Not a very pleasant keyboard experience with me. They look too narrow and tall; even my very tiny fingers can’t type comfortably on it. So, if you get the P7 and end up not liking the keyboard, you are free to install any third party keyboard of your choice from the Play Store. I installed SwiftKey in my own case and I find that it made the whole experience worthwhile for me.
There’s no home button on the P7. All the apps are on the home screen. But you can add additional screen depending on your choice and the amount of apps you’ve chosen to install. If you can’t adjust to this, you can also get a custom launcher from the Play Store like I did—my favourite Android Launched is Nova Launcher Prime.
No physical function keys on the P7. The function keys are onscreen. No buttons on the base of the phone as well.
Battery Performance
The battery is 2500 mAh. It is sufficient and can take you for more than 6 hours of rigorous use. If you use it mildly and haven’t installed a lot of battery draining apps (Facebook is one of those battery draining apps), you can use it for a whole day. I found that I do not panic while using the P7.
Please note that the battery of the Huawei Ascend P7 is non-user replaceable. You can’t even pop open the back of the phone.
Camera
The P7 shoots very decent photos when you are outdoors during the day and when there’s sufficient natural light. Under low light condition, it works too, but not like the low light champions I’ve tried in the past—Nokia Lumia 920, 930, 1020 and 1520.
The front facing camera is very efficient. Photos shot with the front facing camera are so good, that you’ll have to be a professional photographer to be able to tell. I shared some of them to my instagram page and they’re stunning.
My experience using the phone
I travelled for the holiday with the P7, but it wasn’t the phone I was using. Most of the time, the phone is in my bag where I have chargers, a bunch of key and other things. I took out the phone on one occasion and found out that the screen has scratches all over them. I was furious. Only for me to look closely and found that there’s a thick transparent plastic used to protect the screen of the phone to make it look new once you unbox it. I usually remove this kind of plastics (nylon).
It’s a gorilla scratch proof screen that is used on the Ascend P7. This should prevent the screen from key or other sharp object scratches. But, from the way the plastic is applied, it looks as if it was not designed to be taken off. If you’re bothered by the scratches sustained by the plastic, you can take it off.
Call quality and network signal
The phone supports 4G, but we do not have any 4G network in Lagos yet and non on Airtel Ghana as well. I couldn’t test that. But the 3G reception of the P7 is superb. I’m usually testing this from my home that has very poor network signal. Call quality was equally crystal clear. Except your chosen network chose to mess up with reception, everything works pretty decently.
Conclusion
Besides the fact that the Huawei Ascend P7 is only 5” in size and looks like a rip off of Apple design, it’s a phone that will be good value for the money spent on it. If you like the preset keyboard and operating system layout, there’s no need to customise anything and you’re going to enjoy using the phone.
Huawei is out in full force and they’re in top form, getting ready to compete with the likes of Infinix Mobility, Tecno and Samsung as the Android OEMs in Nigeria.
The Huawei Ascend P7 might just end up being the phone I’ll be using till the next phone I’ll be reviewing shows up.
