Today we’ll be taking a look at the Huawei Ascend P7, the newest and one of the most popular smartphones released by Huawei. It’s also one of the cheapest flagships you could possibly buy out there, although, some of its features don’t exactly put it on par with the top-of-the-line flagships. Even so, its pricing more than makes up for those minor hick-ups here and there. First off – this phone does have a Dual-SIM version as well, though the Dual-SIM version doesn’t have identical SIM cards – one of the cards is of Micro-SIM format and the other of Nano-SIM format.
You’ll be able to get this little device for cheaper than any smartphone that bears the name of “flagship” out there, to be more specific the price it’s offered for is circa 450 euros, although you can find some neat deals on it too for circa 490 dollars for the International version. There’s also a China version of this phone, but I’m pretty sure the International version will be more popular ( I’ll go ahead and leave a link on where you can get it from at the end of this article ). In the mean-time, let’s get down to the specifics.
SUMMARY
When you say flagship, you picture the most powerful smartphone out there. The Huawei Ascend P7 is as much of a flagship as most of them, but it falls short on two or three things. One thing it falls short on is the price – you’re not likely to find a flagship cheaper than 600 or 800 dollars ( depending on the date on which you purchase them – some are only 800 on the release-day, where as others keep that price for life ). The other things it seems to fall short on are the hardware and the camera. That’s not to say that those previously mentioned things are bad or lack performance, it’s just that they don’t have as much performance as the regular flagships ( for instance, the camera records in 1080p instead of the standard of 2160p which seems to have been set now for flagships ). There are voices that say the Huawei Ascend P7 is, in fact, just Huawei’s attempt at catching up with the flagships of 2013, yet I ask you now: do you really NEED all that power in a phone – and if so, are you truly willing to pay an arm and a leg for a phone? I’d say the price of 450 euros attributed to this phone ( compared to the 600+ euro price of normal flagships ) is more than fair for this little device.
GENERAL
As far as networks go, the Huawei Ascend P7 is doing just great, having support for 2G, 3G and even 4G networks. As I’ve mentioned, there’s also a a Dual-SIM option with a Micro-SIM main-card and a Nano-SIM main-card. As far as availability goes, currently the International version is out, but certain sources would say that it’ll come out in July, having been announced in May.
BODY
In terms of aspect, the Huawei Ascend P7 is a beautiful device. Its design is very similar to that of the Xperia Z series – fairly plain and simple faces with slightly rounded ages looking sleek and slim. The phone is pretty regular as far as size goes ( it’s as big as it needs to be to host its 5 inch screen ), being only a slightly bit thicker than its predecessor, the Huawei Ascend P6, although it feels just as light to the touch. The specifics of this phone are: 139.8 x 68.8 x 6.5 mm ( or 5.5 x 2.71 x 0.26 in ) in terms of size and approximately 124 g ( or 4.37 oz ) in terms of weight.
DISPLAY
The screen of the Huawei Ascend P7 is one of its best parts. The type of display on this phone is IPS LCD with 16 million colors. This 5.0 inch screen can hold a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels and has a pixel density of circa 441 pixels per inch. The screen is also covered by a sheen of Gorilla Glass 3 for increased protection against scratches and the occasional run-in with keys in pockets. Also, regarding the screen, you can find the Emotion UI v2.3 installed on the Huawei Ascend P7. Personally, I prefer my devices to be as “vanilla” as possible, without any custom UIs ( if I ever want one, I can get it myself ).
SOUND
As far as audio output goes, this phone does pretty well. It has a fairly decent / somewhat high volume with a high clarity and quality. While the phone has no audio enhancements on the hardware side, it does have one of the most potent ones on the software part: the Dolby Digital Plus sound enhancement, to be precise.
MEMORY
On the memory side, the Huawei Ascend P7 is doing pretty good. It has an internal storage space of circa 16 GB which can be further expanded upon via the Micro-SD card slot which can use any card of up to 64 GB. The RAM of the device is also quite impressive – 2 GB. All and all, the Huawei Ascend P7 should offer you quite a bit of speed and you should feel close to no bottlenecking from this side ( now it all depends on what you do with the phone – ANY device can run bad as long as the user loads it up with all sorts of useless applications ).
DATA CONNECTION
The Huawei Ascend P7 has both GPRS and EDGE on it, its internet speeds being as fast as they can get on both the 3G ( 42 MB/s Download speed and 5.76 MB/s Upload speed ) and on the 4G LTE ( which is Cat 4 – the good kind – the kind that has 150 MB/s Download speed and 50 MB/s Upload speed ). This phone also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n with Dual-Band, Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi Hotspot support. The Bluetooth found on this phone is v4.0 with A2DP and LE, as well. The Ascend P7 also has NFC-support and a Micro-USB v2.0 port with USB On-the-Go support. Sadly, it doesn’t have any MHL support, and with no HDMI port on this device you won’t really be able to connect it to your TV or other such things.
CAMERA
The camera of the Huawei Ascend P7 is pretty powerful on one hand, but on the other it’s also quite weaker than its equivalent can be on other top-of-the-line smartphones. The main camera of this phone is a 13 MP one, yet as I’ve already mentioned, it can only record video in 1080p at 30 frames per second and snap pictures at 4160 x 3120 pixels resolutions. The features of this camera include: Autofocus, LED Flash, Geo-Tagging, Touch Focus, Face and Smile Detection, Panorama and HDR. Now for all of you “Selfie” addicts out there, I’ve got some good news. The Ascend P6 was in itself a good device for that sort of things, but this one’s even better – it has an 8 MP frontal camera instead of the 5 MP one on its predecessor.
BATTERY LIFE
The battery of this device is a standard Li-Po 2500 mAh. The alleged promised times of this battery are 422 hours of stand-by and 14 hours of talk-time. The endurance ratings have proved it to be somewhat true ( stacking at around 53 hours ), the phone being capable of running for circa: 13:36 hours of talk-time, 7:13 hours of web-browsing or 8:10 hours of video-playback.
HARDWARE
The hardware found in the Huawei Ascend P7 is pretty good in itself, but popular opinion seems to be that Huawei should have gone with a more popular brand, rather than using their own. As it stands, the Huawei Ascend P7 uses a HiSilicon Kirin 910T chipset, a Quad-Core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A9 processor and a Mali-450MP4 graphics card.
SOFTWARE
On the software-side, the Ascend P7 is doing pretty well at the moment – it’s equipped with the latest version of Android on the market – Android OS v4.4.2 KitKat. There may be some amount of Bloatware on it, too, as only the Google products seem to be as little of that as possible.
FEATURES
The Huawei Ascend P7 has quite a decent amount of features on it ( not as many as the top-flagships, but more than enough, nonetheless ). The phone has a few sensors installed ( an Accelerometer, A Proximity Sensor and a Compass ), it has HTML5 for the browser, an FM Radio and its GPS has support for both A-GPS and GLONASS alike. Naturally, as all Android phones, the Ascend P7 also has Java through MIDP emulation. The messaging on this device is done via your standard methods: SMS ( with Threaded View ), MMS, E-Mail, Push Mail and IM. Currently, the phone’s available in 3 colors: Black, White and Pink.
Here’s a brief list of what this phone is capable of:
- SNS integration
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
- XviD/MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player
- MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV/Flac player
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk
- Organizer
- Document viewer
- Photo viewer/editor
- Voice memo/dial/commands
- Predictive text input
This concludes our little review of the Huawei Ascend P7. If you’ve liked the phone and would like to purchase one for yourself, I can direct you to one of the best bargains I could find – simply click HERE. Otherwise, the Huawei Ascend P7 is probably the cheapest and flagship, if not it’s the closest thing you can get to a flagship in that amount of money. It’s a great phone and the few things that “hold it back” are so minor, that most users won’t really notice it. It’s reasons like this phone that Huawei is where it is today ( practically, it was boosted enormously by the Huawei Ascend P6, but they think this one will do even more than that one ).
