HONOR X7b Review – Low Price, A reasonable specs in hand

Again, this is another no stranger approach towards end of the year, a phone will suddenly appear and it has a good compelling price tag to it as well, HONOR this time came out with a budget phone that might just attract some of the crowd and we are here to see what the HONOR X7b can do for the most part.

Unboxing Content

For those who have not watch the unboxing, below is the video that you might want to check it out along with our first experience with it.

Who is this for ?

Something that just works and reasonable in terms of camera, design and display and that still appeals by paying slightly lesser, but still came with some reasonable features that one might use for leisure or work, in summary, pay a bit less, get some of the modern stuff that works all day long.

Design

As a budgeted less than RM900 (or less than 190USD) device, the HONOR X7b certainly won’t disappoint with the back cover design that is made entirely out of polycarbonate mixed plastic with it’s flowing design all around it. This caught my eye when I first look at it, and upon touching it, it does feel plastic, but hey, just by looking at it seems to be pretty yet put some of the fashion statement to it whenever if you put it on the cafe’s table or any flat surface with it’s Quad Curve back.

This is no stranger as well as the HONOR X7b still borrows some of the HONOR 2022 and 2023 design in to it, I would say it is a mix of HONOR 90 and HONOR 70 styles to it, which also means the slimness profile is there measuring in 8.24mm and weight of 199 grams. Your hands won’t felt tired while holding for long periods and can be easily navigated over the screen even with one hand. While it looks beautiful, the practicality remains with the 3.5mm headphone jack, something that is rarely seen these days, even at this specs segment.

The HONOR X7b came in two colors, Flowing Silver and Emerald Green, offering the same material across two colors with just slightly different on design, and whichever color you pick, it is still appealing over the youth and casual segments as the main target users alike.

Display & Audio

Despite the slimness of the phone, the HONOR X7b puts in a 6.8 inch, 90Hz fast refresh rate display with a 1080P+ resolution that is able to support multi gesture touches responsively and the slight down part that it is using a TFT LCD screen. However that being said, the phone has a good aspect ratio of 20:09 and from the color accuracy side point of view, it is still vibrant with good contrast in place with virtually no ghosting whenever you are watching a fast moving video, while maintaining smooth scrolling with most of the apps tested such as mobile browsing and social media portals. That being said, productivity is just nice with such screen, and great for those that consumes alot of streaming with Dynamic Dimming and Circadian Night Display that cares for your eyes and visual health. The HONOR X7b can peak over 800 nits of brightness and operational automatically depending on surrounding conditions. The HONOR X7b supports Widevine L1 for DRM streaming apps such as Netflix or Disney+.

The HONOR X7b appeals quite admirable in this segment by implementing dual firing speakers within a slim tall phone. It can be loud and audible in medium room space when the volume is cranked up to 200% with very no crackles and this is especially useful in slightly noisy environment without using your headphones or TWS. Experience wise, it does well in vocals (great for calls/communications) and treble but slightly lack of bass, and that is to be expected however that can be slightly improved by reducing the volume back to around 100% to restore back some of the bass back to the balance. Options are limited too on sound adjustments, unless you are pairing it with a wired earphones (via USB C or 3.5mm jack) with Histen Sound adjustment in the Sound Options under settings, or otherwise connectivity is stable and no losses over connecting via Bluetooth TWS.

Camera

The HONOR X7b strength lies on the camera, consisting of a 108MP main lens, a 5MP Wide lens and finally a 2MP macro lens. This time around, HONOR uses 9 in 1 pixel binning in order to reach the level of resolution clarity over the camera setup, and this resulted in better quality images.

*Day time shots

Day time wise, I find that the HONOR X7b perform admirably well in a mix of still surroundings and images captured with movements around, of course certain things aren’t avoidable such as if a subject is moving too fast that may cause blur on that person or subject only. However suffice to say the phone still be able to take most of the details, clarity and color well and I find that there is only very minor differences in the tones, which is accepted by all means and ready to be uploaded as a high quality image over any social media posts. The zoomed in shots still maintains good clarity in image too, especially macro which gives all the details, especially flora such as flowers and leaves.

Night time wise, considering the fact that this phone falls under the affordable segment, the downside is you need some degree of light within the area of capture, and the AI will do the rest of the processing it’s best to identify your capture. The results can be satisfying with tree branches at the background of an image can still be identified to a certain level while rain drops can be clearly seen when testing in a mix of light rain and night time surroundings.

Finally the video, 1080P at 30FPS is the most you can get from the phone, a fairly standard for today on any phones, and this is not the camera limitation, rather the included SOC is one of the factor that the framerate is limited, but it’s there as you need it and I find it suitable as a general purpose video camera that is ready to record, especially short clips or a quick video.

Performance, Software, Experience

The HONOR X7b internal hardware is still considerably a standard one within the segment, equipped with a dated but still efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G Octa-Core SOC with a large 256GB of internal storage and 8GB of DDR4X RAM under the hood. AC Wi-Fi became a norm and this phone has it as well. If were to compared with the previous generation HONOR X7, this is a big bump up while from the price standpoint, it is consider a value to get phone considering HONOR is using UFS fast storage and not the slower eMMC type, but should you need more storage, HONOR still retain a MicroSD card slot for further expansion up to another 1TB. HONOR RAM Turbo is back too with an additional 8GB of Virtual Memory ensuring smooth app switching and transition. A 6000MaH battery is in place and according to my typical usage of a browsing mix, Social media, some gaming, calls, messages, it can last about nearly 2.5 days, and if that’s not enough, the 35W HONOR SuperCharge will get you back on track about a little over 1 hour.

In order to keep things lighter in terms of consumption, HONOR uses Android 13 with Magic UI 7.2, but with a few things missing, notably the HONOR Connect, Seamless Transfer and Smart Sensing. With that said, those are the only few known stuff removed and the rest remains such as Multi-Window, Gestures, Split Window, Honor Share and the rest of the standard issue Android 13 core features are here to stay. In my personal opinion, one would use more on the phone and uploads were all done mostly towards the cloud or manual transfer, so I find that from the usability and practicality point of view, one still enjoy the features of the X7b without a problem at all.

Last but not least, here’s comes the benchmark as comparison, indicating multimedia, multitasking capability or even your standard MOBA, Platformer, Arcade style, Call of Duty games will just run fine with it.

Technical Specifications

Verdict & Conclusion

RM799 is the price that you are looking at, and to be honest the HONOR X7b kicks in further the arena of budgeted device can be pretty on the looks, while specifications are just slightly dated, it still performs and keeps up with today’s standard with larger RAM in the same category, and as a bonus, you still can expand your storage and a camera that just works pretty well out the box. Despite all of these even without 5G, it still can go far with proper software optimisation from HONOR and ongoing updates that just might make this phone even better in terms of usability and such trend can also be seen from other contenders. Hence I find it reasonable for what you are paying and getting for.