Huawei’s new mid-range phone is here
Huawei’s dropping more mid-range goodness this March. The company’s Nova 7i (or Nova 6 SE, or P40 Lite depending where you are in the world) is finally arriving in the country. The new phone is the first device to hit outside of China that carries the company’s new Kirin 810 processor, which finally replaces the aging Kirin 710F chipset.
In typical Huawei fashion, the Nova 7i looks dope on the outside and has powerful hardware on the inside, along with super-fast charging that we’ve only seen previously on their top-end devices.
Packaging and contents:
Huawei’s packaging for their mid-range phones hasn’t changed at all, and you’re getting the same all-white box with the name of the device printed on the front just like their other devices.
Inside the box, you’ll see the phone (ours came in a Crush Green color), a silicone case, Type-C USB cable, and a SuperCharge USB charger.
Meet Huawei’s new mid-range monster
The Nova 7i might have many names outside the country, but it’s still the same mid-range beast that we were salivating at when it was first announced in China a few months ago.
The phone is made in typical Huawei fashion, sporting a new gradient coloration that’s quite different from what the company released previously. Huawei says that the manufacturing process for the Nova 7i uses a special film that produces a unique glare effect while improving scratch resistance.
While we can’t test the claim about better scratch protection, the Crush Green variant of the Nova 7i does look quite different than what we’ve seen previously.
The big change here design-wise is the use of the square camera module on the rear which is fast becoming the de rigueur choice for many brands nowadays.
Aside from the quad-camera module and Huawei’s logo at the bottom, the back is pretty bare since the company integrated the fingerprint scanner to the power button on the left side.
Flipping the phone over, you’ll notice that the device uses a punch-hole notch that’s nestled on the upper-left side of the 6.4-inch, full HD+ IPS LCD display. The front camera is a 16-megapixel deal.
The display itself looks good and has plenty of brightness, and has an overall screen-to-body ratio of 90.6% thanks to the slim bezels.
The quad-camera module is composed of a 48-megapixel main shooter with an f/1.8 aperture, 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera with an f/2.2 aperture lens, 2-megapixel depth sensor and a 2-megapixel macro camera.
The main shooter is powered by Huawei’s AI smarts and has all the features that show up in most of their new phones nowadays, including Super Night Mode, and body shape-optimization in videos.
The Nova 7i is the first phone from Huawei that ships with their new 7nm Kirin 810 chipset, which will take over from the venerable Kirin 710 SoC.
It’s made from the same 7nm process as the company’s flagship Kirin 980 chipset, making Huawei one of the few manufacturers in the market today with two 7nm-based offerings in their lineup.
For those who don’t know, having smaller lithography allows chipmakers to cram in more transistors compared to similarly-sized chips using 14nm tech. More transistors mean better performance, and generally better power efficiency as well.
The Kirin 810 chipset scores pretty high in AnTuTu, moving it past the offerings of similarly priced smartphones that use Qualcomm chips. From the looks of things, the Nova 7i is poised to become a very competitive mid-range gaming device thanks to GPU Turbo that’s baked into EMUI10. The 8GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage doesn’t hurt at all, either.
You know the drill by now – the Nova 7i doesn’t get access to Google Play thanks to the ongoing spat between the US and Huawei, but you can still download different apps through Huawei’s AppGallery.
Apps like TikTok, Viber, Facebook, and ShareIT can be downloaded via the AppGallery, and apps that aren’t present like Grab, Messenger, Waze and Mobile Legends can be downloaded via third-party apps and through the Huawei Browser.
The Nova 7i has a big battery inside of its beautiful glass body, with the battery clocking in at 4200mAh. That huge battery paired with the power-efficient nature of the chipset should ensure around a day’s worth of use, minimum.
The Nova 7i is getting super-fast charging thanks to its USB Type-C port and Huawei’s own SuperCharge tech. The charger included in the package supports 40W fast charging, which is blazingly-fast for a mid-range phone. We went from 20% to 70% in 20 minutes, beating many fast-charging metrics from similarly-priced phones.
The Nova 7i is priced at Php 13,990.
Huawei Nova 7i Specs
- 2.27GHz HiSilicon Kirin 810 octa-core processor
- Mali-G52 MP6 GPU
- 8GB of RAM
- 6.4-inch Full HD+ LCD display; 1080 x 2310 resolution
- 128GB of expandable storage (up to 256GB via NM card)
- Quad rear cameras: 48-megapixel f/1.8 main camera; 8-megapixel f/2.4 ultra-wide-angle camera; 2-megapixel f/2.4 depth sensor; 2-megapixel f/2.4 macro camera; with PDAF, LED Flash
- 16-megapixel f/2.0 front camera
- 4G, LTE (Dual SIM, Hybrid Tray)
- WiFi, Bluetooth
- GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
- Side-mounted Fingerprint scanner, Facial Recognition, USB-C, GPU Turbo 2.0
- Android 10 with EMUI 10
- 4200mAh Battery with 40W SuperCharge