Huawei Ascend P7 review

Huawei has unveiled its latest flagship smartphone – the Huawei Ascend P7. Following hot on the heels of Samsung’s Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8, Huawei’s 5in handset has come out swinging with a lithe 6.5mm-thick body, a pixel-packed 445ppi display and a whole swathe of premium features. See also: what’s the best smartphone of 2014?

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Design

Visually, the Ascend P7 looks every bit the high-end smartphone. Just like its predecessor, the Ascend P6, the P7 features bevelled brushed metal edges running across the top and sides, and a rounded profile curving around on the bottom edge. Flip the phone around, and the glass back looks eerily similar to that of Sony’s Xperia Z2. Look more closely and you’ll spot a tastefully textured weave underneath the glass layer, something Huawei has achieved by sandwiching seven layers of materials together.

The Ascend P7 is available in pink, white or black, according to your taste – and whichever you choose, the aluminium alloy skeleton is sandwiched between two sheets of Gorilla Glass 3. Its unusually slender body and dainty dimensions make for a phone which feels great in the hand, too. The narrow bezels mean that, despite the 5in screen, the Ascend P7 is more pocketable than its rivals, and dramatically less bulky than the king-sized Sony Xperia Z2 or the chunky, rounded Nokia Lumia 1020.

That doesn’t mean it’s fragile, however. The Ascend P7 is solidly built, and while you can’t dunk it in a bucket of water like the Samsung Galaxy S5 or Sony Xperia Z2, the P7’s nano-coated chassis and internals mean that it can happily shrug off the occasional downpour.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Display

Up front, Huawei has equipped the P7 with a 5in, Full HD display. The IPS panel serves up an eye-prickling 445ppi pixel density, and LED backlighting delivers soaring brightness. We measured the P7’s maximum brightness at 448cd/m2, and while the 745:1 contrast ratio is some way behind the best handsets we’ve seen, the P7’s slightly greyish blacks are noticeable only when the lights go down.

The only disappointment is that Huawei has evidently tried to compensate for the P7’s mediocre contrast by crushing the darkest greys into black – this makes pictures and movies look more punchy, but shadow detail is lost. Happily, the colour balance is spot on, and the Ascend P7 serves up realistic, natural-looking skintones and bold primary colours with equal aplomb. Overall, it’s a pleasure to behold.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Hardware and performance

Most current high-end Android smartphones use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, but the P7 is powered instead by a 1.8GHz quad-core HiSilicon Kirin 910T CPU, an ARM Mali 450 GPU and 2GB of RAM. This isn’t a combination we’ve seen before, but it makes Huawei’s heavily-skinned edition of Android 4.4 feel perfectly snappy. Applications load quickly, and homescreens and menus slide fluidly in and out of view.

Delve more deeply however and the limitations of the hardware begin to tell. Fire up the camera app, and the settings menus scroll jerkily. As you begin to spend more time with the Huawei Ascend P7, the tell-tale judder of an overtaxed CPU becomes a regular sight.

Benchmark tests expose just how far the Ascend P7 lags behind other manufacturers’ flagships. We ran the SunSpider 1.0.2 browser benchmark several times, both in the stock browser and Chrome, and the Ascend P7’s fastest result was 1,046ms. That’s miles behind the premium-priced opposition: the HTC One M8 completed the benchmark in 590ms and the Samsung Galaxy S5 took only 391ms.

Similarly, in the single- and multi-core elements of the GeekBench 3 benchmark the P7 achieved scores of 600 and 1,806 – around 33% slower than the smartphones we’ve tested with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 801 CPU. Interestingly, the Huawei did claim one scalp in Geekbench 3, and that’s the Nexus 5 – the Ascend P7 proved around 2% faster in both tests.

The Ascend P7’s biggest headache proved to be our standard graphics benchmark, GFXBench. Here, in the demanding T-Rex gaming test, the Huawei stuttered its way to an average of 12.4fps. With its flagship rivals all approaching the 30fps mark in the same test, and the Nexus 5 nearly doubling its result with an average of 24fps, it’s clear that Huawei’s hardware trails well behind the pack.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Features

In some areas, Huawei has really gone to town on the Ascend P7. 4G LTE support comes as standard, and thanks to the dual-purpose microSD card tray, it’s possible to swap your microSD card for a secondary SIM.

Huawei has also doubled up on antennas, and claims that the pair in the Ascend P7 improve reception strength by over 50% compared to the P6. The CAT-4 4G chipset can hit a whopping 150Mbits/sec; as ever, we anticipate that the limiting factor will be the speeds of the 4G network, not the hardware in the phone.

In other areas, Huawei has been stingy. There’s no dual-band 802.11ac or even dual-band 802.11n; the Ascend P7 is equipped only with single-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4 and NFC.

Lastly there’s a 2,500mAh battery sealed inside the Ascend P7’s body. This is impressively capacious given the handset’s slender physique, but it delivers merely average battery life. In our audio playback test, which streams a 128Kbit/sec audio podcast from SoundCloud over 4G, the Huawei’s battery depleted at a rate of 5.6% per hour. Playing back a 720p video in airplane mode, with the screen’s brightness calibrated to 120cd/m2, chewed through 10.3% of the battery per hour – that’s almost twice as greedy as the Sony Xperia Z2 and Samsung Galaxy S5, which consumed 5.6% and 5.2% in the same test.

The handset fared better in the GFXBench test; in a game like this we estimate you’d get 2hrs 25mins of gaming out of one charge. Remember though that this test was running at only 12.4fps – less than half the framerate of its competitors.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Camera

The Ascend P7 is equipped with a formidable pair of snappers. At the rear, there’s a 13-megapixel sensor packed in behind an f/2.4 aspherical lens. At the front sits an unusually pixel-dense 8-megapixel sensor. This isn’t just for ultra-crisp video chatting; it’s equipped with a panoramic function designed for taking group selfies, or “groufies” as Huawei calls them. This actually works really well, producing beautifully sharp, wide-angle group shots. We’re not sure the name will catch on, though.

Both cameras are backed up by an Altek ISP which touts DSLR-level noise reduction and low-light image enhancement. Daytime shots come through bright and bold, with plenty of detail, but look closely and there’s evidently a lot of image processing going on behind the scenes. Contrast is frequently a little too stark, and when you view your images on a larger screen the tell-tale halos from an over-eager edge-enhancement filter are clearly visible. The HDR setting is unimpressive, too: in most instances we preferred the improved sharpness of the standard shots.

Low-light performance is more encouraging. Head-to-head with the large sensor in Sony’s Xperia Z2, the Ascend P7 easily takes the overall victory, with excellent clarity and detail. The high ISO means that low-light pictures look more grainy than on rival handsets, however; and predictably the Ascend P7’s sensor can’t keep pace with the Nokia Lumia 1020, which remains the gold standard in smartphone cameras.

Video is something of a disappointment. Full HD recordings emerge looking far too processed, and contrast and colours look rather overblown. The video stabilising function is best left disabled, too – with it enabled, motion is clearly smoother, but this smoothness comes at the expense of resolution; to our eyes, the resolution appeared to be effectively halved.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Software

The Ascend P7 is based on Android 4.4.2, but it’s heavily wrapped up in Huawei’s own Emotion UI. Those coming from a different flavour of Android will find the interface barely recognisable; indeed, the Emotion UI’s clean, bright colours and rounded icons look more than a little like Apple’s iOS. Huawei’s decision to do away with the stock App Drawer means that it works a little like iOS, too, with all installed apps residing directly on the homescreen, or within folders thereon.

The backgrounds, colour scheme and icon designs can be customised with a variety of themes. Most themes affect only the appearance rather than the layout, but the Simple mode replaces the icons with large, onscreen buttons – something we can see appealing to those with ailing eyesight, or users that want a less fussy interface.

Some of the other changes and tweaks are welcome, too. The drop-down settings menu provides quick access to all the major features, and we appreciated additions such as the dedicated screenshot button and the button to quickly toggle automatic screen brightness on and off.

The task manager has been customised too, with a handy bar at the top of the screen which details RAM usage; close down an app and you can immediately see how much memory has been freed up, or close all open apps with a single press.
Huawei has also added a selection of its own apps. There’s a handy File Manager for quick access to documents, audio, video and other file categories; a DLNA client for streaming media to and from compatible devices; and an app installer for manually installing APK files. There’s also a Mirror app, but we can’t see ourselves using a smartphone as a shaving mirror. At least, not a smartphone that’s not completely waterproof.

Huawei Ascend P7 review: Verdict

The Ascend P7 gets a lot right. It looks and feels gorgeous, the screen and cameras are good and it’s refreshingly light and compact compared to the giant-sized flagships from other manufacturers. The major sticking point is the internals: Huawei’s latest flagship lags well behind its Android rivals in terms of both battery life and raw power, while the £299 Nexus 5 edges it out in the value for money stakes. Ultimately, the Ascend P7 marks a big step forward for Huawei, but it’s not the giant-killer we might have hoped for.

Physical
Dimensions	69 x 140 x 6.5mm (WDH)
Weight	124g
Touchscreen	yes
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	2.00GB
Camera megapixel rating	13.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	5.0in
Resolution	1080 x 1920
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Android