Before the recent Holy Week, it had some teasers trying to make hype on the Huawei Mobile Philippines newest Nova smartphone. After over a month, did it affect us? Here's our verdict on the Huawei Nova 2 Lite
Like what I said on the physical looks, looks like it was the love child of Huawei Nova 2i and GR3 2017 if you can imagine it with the same back view but with a smaller form factor and the placing of the fingerprint reader. With the black variant as our review unit, it was a perfect main driver for me in the past few days with some rugged usual normal days outside of those media events. Not that much fingerprint smudges on it. Finally, Huawei decided to put in the true dual nano SIM and micro SD slot in one tray as some of their users of previous models had this pain point and even some Chinese brands had it for that price point. The UI had some lil tweaks or almost the same as you may see based on our previous hands-ons of Huawei P20 series and Mate 10. Another downer for us, again they did not include that 4G toggle button
Huawei plus the bit old school Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor continues on what I love on the brand, the connecitivity department from calls, texts, mobile data, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and OTG support
Here are the benchmarks based on the phone's configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon 430. Not that good on the number of available sensors
With it's 5.7 inch HD+ display, 28 nm-based processor and 3,000 mAh battery, Huawei Nova 2 Lite survived in our video battery rundown test in 13 hours and 35 minutes. On real-life heavy usage, it cannot survived me for a day with 5 1/2 hours of screen on time so I had my powerbank ready in the late night.
Audio is one of the shining factors of Huawei Nova 2 Lite on the 3.5 mm. audio jack with the right balance of lows, mids and highs in the number of genres of music in my micro SD. A lot better than GR3 and GR5 2017.
Huawei Nova 2 Lite has dual main camera system (the second one goes for bokeh effects which is not that good compared to GR5 2017) and 8 MP front camera. The primary main camera worked fine for me on either bright indoor lighting or in daytime but the horror thing goes out when I am in places with mixed lighting and nighttime. Another sad thing over a month after it's release and waiting for that possible OTA, the phone does not have a pro mode which is still a question as the more affordable GR3 2017 had it. The 8 MP selfie camera could be better but thumbs up to them as they had this ingenious idea of enabling three levels of brightness on it's front selfie camera
Huawei Nova 2 Lite rear camera samples
Huawei Nova 2 Lite front camera sample compared with level 3 flash
The "pros" for me include the form factor, latest EMUI based on Android Oreo, true dual nano SIM and micro SD support, good audio and connecitivity. The "cons" that I seen on the device which I previously loved on GR5 2017 - removing the 4G toggle button in pulldown menu, lack of pro (a big question if to compare with GR3 2017 which is more affordable yet more powerful), the lackluster front camera and on battery. I will gonna grade 3.5 out of of 5 for the Huawei Nova 2 Lite
