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Battery life
- 3,340mAh battery will easily clear a day
- Several battery saving modes
The Huawei Nova 3i packs a 3340mAh battery which can suffice most users with basic day to day tasks like phone calls, streaming content, music and scrolling through long social media pages periodically.
Of course, if you are a smartphone gamer and have a weakness for demanding titles like PUBG Mobile, the one-day battery claim doesn't apply. The GPU Turbo technology does optimize the battery life, but that's not enough to stretch the battery life to one day with 3-4 classic PUBG matches and given that you survive for at least 20 minutes.
The charging speed is a little disappointing on the Nova 3i. The Kirin 710 does not offer Huawei's 22.5W SuperCharge and instead, it has 10W charging via micro USB. It takes around 2 hours to charge from 0-100%, which is slow considering what competition has to offer. And with Qualcomm's Quick Charge, a lot of Android users are accustomed to fast charging.
If we look at the price, it's slightly pricier than the Mi A2 and Honor Play, but still lacks fast charging. Whereas, the other two offer support for fast charging and also have a USB Type-C port.
If you are less smartphone dependant throughout a day, even 80% of the battery can sail you through without needing a charger. So, the battery life is quite good, which would have been sweeter if it had fast charge support.
Camera
- 16MP + 2MP camera enables bokeh-adjusting wide aperture mode
- AR lens lets you apply facial effects
The Huawei Nova 3i has a 16MP f/2.2 primary sensor with phase detection auto-focus (PDAF) and is coupled with a secondary 2MP monochrome sensor. The camera UI is a fully loaded app that offers way too many modes and settings for a minimalist. But the good part is that Huawei has baked it very neatly for a clutter-free experience. Only till you don't start exploring it.
You can scroll through the modes by swiping left or right. There's a lot to discover in the app, and a lot to play with too. Huawei has also leveraged the AR capabilities, which is again inspired by a more expensive counterpart. Nonetheless, modes like Qmoji and 3D Objects are sometimes fun to play with, especially if you are into creatives and art.
Furthermore, there are features like portrait mode, pro mode, moving picture, panorama, light painting, 3D panorama, time-lapse, and the list goes on. But the highlight is its Pro mode for video, a rare feature on smartphones.
Huawei has used AI algorithms that are said to be "driven by learning over 100 million images", which helps it recognizes 22 categories of 500+ scenes and provides optimized shooting result. Now that's still arguable if you want to have AI making your shots better or not. For that, it has an option to turn off the tweaking done by the AI.
In a nutshell, the camera interface does offer fun features to play with, but I feel it's a bit overdone at places. For example, if the AI is detecting the scene, then why is the Night mode still there. Also, the half-baked 'Background' and 'Effect' modes are just visually unimpressive. The 'Background' feature sometimes chops-off your ears and at times it just doesn't register your hair.
Let's take a look at the most crucial part- the camera performance and image quality. The camera setup looks very identical to the one on P20 Lite, at least on paper. Still, the day-light images confirm that the camera is quite close to the Nova 3's quality as well.
The Nova 3i manages to reproduce rich and vibrant colors and the right amount of sharpness in well-lit conditions. We tried clicking distant shots and close-ups, the camera did really well in registering the good amount of detail and the algorithms do play a huge role in fine-tuning the pictures. For the most part, the AI support did remove the extra amount of noise in dark conditions and also enhances the sharpness and colors in the process.
The edge detection on the portrait mode is a hit or a miss in low-light, but in comparison to the Mi A2's camera for portrait, the Nova 3i did produce better results in most cases. The Mi A2 does click more natural looking shots, but the pictures aren't sharp and it doesn't handle exposure that efficiently. Whereas the software on the Nova 3i tweaks the image in a fraction of seconds for a better result. For indoor portraits, the Mi A2 again takes the lead.
On the front, the phone packs a 24MP primary sensor with f/2.0 aperture and a 2MP secondary sensor for depth sensing. It's a decent selfie shooter if you like aesthetically pleasing pictures. Enabling the AI camera makes you fair, fixes blemishes and does slight smoothening without hurting the details. So your selfie doesn't look like a plastic face, instead, it just touches up. Still, if you want some extra touch-up you can always turn on the beauty filter.
In low-light, the front camera just fails to click clear selfies. If you're shooting in dark, always turn on the screen flash for a decent picture.
Overall, the quad camera setup on the Nova 3i manages to click some social media worthy picture right from the boot. It is a really capable camera, that rarely lags behind because of its key contributor- the aggressive software.
Camera samples
Rear camera samples
Front camera samples
