Honor 7X review

Battery life

Battery life is always a big consideration for your next phone, and you’ll be glad to know the Honor 7X offers solid performance that matches a lot of competing phones.

It’s not game-changing, but considering the phone uses a fairly average 3,340mAh cell and there’s a large screen on the front of the phone drawing plenty of power we’ve been quite surprised with how good the life has been.

In general use we found the Honor 7X would happily last a full day, but if you’re going to be using your phone a little more intensively you may find you need to give it a boost part-way through the day.

Even with normal usage you’d struggle to get the Honor 7X to last more than a day though, so expect to recharge this phone overnight. If you’re looking for a cheap device with stronger battery life you may want to opt for the Moto E4 Plus, which we found would last two days with average usage.

One feature you may miss with the Honor 7X is fast charging – Honor hasn’t seen fit to add the feature to this phone, so you’ll need to rely on regular charging, and we often found this frustratingly slow. It’s a bit of a disappointment considering a lot of other mid-range phones now charge much faster than the Honor 7X.

We put the 7X through our standard battery test, which involves playing a Full HD video for 90 minutes from full charge, at full brightness and with accounts syncing over Wi-Fi, and the phone had 78% battery left at the end of the test.

We found the Nokia 6 dropped to 78% too, while if you’re looking for stronger battery you may want to look at the Moto G5S Plus that performed better only dropping down to 84%.

The phone is charged via the micro USB slot at the bottom of the phone – not surprisingly there’s no option for wireless charging either.

Camera

There's a dual-camera setup on the rear of the Honor 7X, with a 16MP sensor doing most of the heavy lifting and a 2MP sensor to the side of it which is dedicated to depth-sensing.

In good lighting you’ll be happy with the images Honor 7X can deliver. For most photography you’ll be using just this primary lens, and we found it was good at focusing and taking a photo, although it could sometimes be a little slow.

Watch the video below to see the camera on the Honor 7X in action

As shooting times can be a little slow you won’t be able to whip your phone out of your pocket and be able to take the picture instantly. Instead you’ll need to wait a few seconds to be able to focus and take a shot.

The depth-sensing 2MP lens comes into play when you use the wide aperture mode, which is a feature we saw on the Honor 6X. This will find the edges of the subject of your image and blurs the background around them, so you’ll have a photo with either the foreground or background in focus.

It’s a great effect and there’s the option to edit the blurred area of the image after. It works quite quickly on the Honor 7X too, but it isn’t as accurate at identifying the subject or as easy to edit as it is on say the Honor 9.

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Night-time shooting is when the Honor 7X begins to really struggle. Poor lighting is a real problem for the camera, and you can tell it’s not as powerful as the ones on higher-end Honor handsets or flagship phones. 

That said it does manage to keep pace with competitors such as the Nokia 6 and the Moto G5S Plus, which are around the same price point.

That front camera is an 8MP shooter that also boasts a Portrait mode feature, which we found worked, but not as well as on the rear camera. The selfie shooter will take decent snaps for social media and the like, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Camera samples

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