We will never be left out in 5G as finally, we got our review of our first 5G smartphone from our friends at Huawei Philippines.
Meet the Huawei Nova 7 5G which we think has better value compared to the more affordable Nova 7 SE 5G. Here's our verdict.
You can check our unpacking of the said device as we were lucky that we got an official commercial unit (not a marketing unit) so these things will be the ones that you are about to see when buy it.
EMUI and the challenge of having no Google Play Services:
It was out first serious time to use a Huawei smartphone with no Google Play services but unlike right now, we got two sources on getting Android apps like AppGallery and the game changer for us, Petal Search which broadens our hunt for must-have apps (not only limited to ApkPure) and got no problems from known local fintech apps, using Microsoft Edge for Gmail and Google Drive and we even got Google Maps on Petal Search. On EMUI 10.1 with a respetable Kirin 985 processor, our overall experience was a lot better compared to it's near brother Kirin 980 on Nova 5T. Out of the box, the phone will give you 208 GB out of 256 GB in remaining storage which is good enough for us despite that the device does not have micro SD support.
Display:
One of the upgrades over the Nova 7 over the SE model is the OLED model which is an eye candy for us either in default or dark mode. We really maximized the always-on display for notifications. The in-display fingerprint reader was quite fast for us for most of the time but watch out when you put it inside your pocket as there are times that will accidentally open despite of that "feature" that prevents it.
Connectivity:
Unfortunately, there was no 5G coverage in our area (but will do an update as long as we still have the device and check it somewhere with 5G area) but LTE, calls, texts, Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi are excellent as always on the number of Huawei devices that we checked in the past
Benchmarks:
No wonder that Nova 7 5G has 10 point multi touch. On Antutu, normal mode scored at 331919 while on performance mode, it soared at 413853.
Battery:
Aside from performance, Kirin 985 is a lot better compared to Kirin 980 in Nova 5T in terms of power efficiency. On our video battery rundown test, it survived at 27 hours and 25 minutes. Used it as a main driver for a week, we usually have it for 1.25 days in heavy usage and average of 8 hours screen-on-time.
Camera:
Zoom, ultra wide, normal, pro, 64 MP mode and low light photos were above average on the outputs that we got with accurate colors. Portrait selfies were a hit or miss for us. One thing that we first discovered (as it was not stated in most of the reviews that we saw before) that for some reason with a more powerful Kirin 985 SoC, Nova 7 5G does not have 60 fps video recording in all video resolutions (HD, FHD, 4K) compared to Huawei Y9s with weaker Kirin 710F processor but can do HD and FHD 60 fps video recording. You can shoot videos on either H.264 or H.265 video encoding.
Here are our various photo and video camera samples:
Huawei Nova 7 5G rear camera samples
Huawei Nova 7 5G normal to portrait selfie camera comparison
Huawei Nova 7 5G 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x, 20x zoom rear camera comparison
Huawei Nova 7 5G 16 to 64 MP rear camera comparisons
Check out our video samples:
Huawei Nova 7 5G HD rear camera sample
Huawei Nova 7 5G Full HD rear camera sample
Huawei Nova 7 5G 4K rear camera sample
For Php 23990, Huawei Nova 7 5G is a very good buy for the OLED display, more on storage, 5G, very good well-rounder for photo and video, connectivity , EMUIand battery life. One thing that we cannot accept for now (I hope Huawei can enable it via a software update) that it does not support 60 fps video recording. For us, it's 4.25 out of 5 for Huawei Nova 7 5G.
