Honor 70: Right On The Money!

Key Specs

Mid-range price, Higher End design

The unit we have here is the Emerald green (trust me it’s a lot more green in person) Honor 70, the latest in Huawei’s Google-having twin. It sports an ultra-premium dual curved front and back glass design that warps into the sidebands that are mirror and shiny, resulting in a design that fits nicely in your hand and is easy to grip too. The body is also tall and narrow, which goes a long way with one-handed use and typing. 3-4 years ago this kind of design would have only been available in today’s equivalent of RM3-5,000 flagship-level phones so we really shouldn’t take this for granted.

What I normally call a cooking stove of a camera bump is now shaped like a DJ’s spin table, but Honor calls it the spotlight Halo due to the color-matched dual rings. In these two camera bumps are two cameras, one main and one ultrawide with both of them being 50MP+ pixel binning workhorses. There is also dual-tone flash and a depth sensor so you know the portrait mode shots on this are going to be much better than a software-based implementation.

Is a dual camera setup enough?

What I normally call a cooking stove of a camera bump is now shaped like a DJ’s spin table, but Honor calls it the spotlight Halo due to the color-matched dual rings. In these two camera bumps are two cameras, one main and one ultrawide with both of them being 50MP+ pixel binning workhorses. There is also dual-tone flash and a depth sensor so you know the portrait mode shots on this are going to be much better than a software-based implementation.

Truth be told, all the fancy flagship cameras sport a main+ultrawide+telephoto combo, and when you come down to the mid-range level, sacrifices have to be made and I firmly stand by Honor and every other brand’s decision to pair main cameras with an ultrawide. Gone are the days when a dual-camera setup means main and telephoto. Feel free to ask around, I guarantee you that ultrawide is used far more often than telephoto.

Main camera

This is a shocker, being the somewhat mid-range phone connoisseur at Zen The Geek, this camera is shockingly good. Honor knows how to pick mid-range sensors well. It’s not Magic4 Pro good, but at least it doesn’t lag here. Exposure, dynamic range, contrast, and color all leave me nothing to complain about. White balance is also spot on. This is a flagship-grade camera in a mid-range body without any doubt.

Wide Angle

We start to see some compromises here, but still an A- implementation here. White balance matches up with the main camera without any color tint, which almost every other mid-range phone I have tested failed to do so. Exposure is nicely done here but it’s slightly underexposed. Contrast and color also leave me with a good impression. Corner sharpness is not razor sharp but definitely forgivable.

Selfie

A decent performance here by the 32MP selfie camera. I want to thank Honor for making it a centered hole-punch selfie camera so my pupils look normal. It’s also pretty obvious that it leans towards brighter exposure (nearly blown out) as my black shirt is brightened up, but the dynamic range is impressive. Normally the sunlit background would be totally blown out but the camera saved a surprising amount of detail. Sharpness is also excellent, you can almost see my nose hair.

Plenty of power with a clean 120Hz display

The Honor 70 comes with a Snapdragon 778G+ (6nm) and 5G support. Pretty tippy-top as far as mid-range chipsets from industry champion Snapdragon goes, just shy of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1.

Yes, it plays genshin impact at 60fps. No, it does not do so at max settings. Yes, it gets hot quickly. This phone handled social media doomscrolling easily, and you can play some games on it if you don’t plan to be a professional Mobile Legends player.

The display is 120Hz, but the dynamic switching mode is not great. I noticed a lot of times when scrolling could be 120Hz buttery smooth but the dynamic refresh rate just did not kick in and it gave me 60Hz instead. So for the most part this phone was set to “high refresh rate” mode instead of dynamic. Looking at the descriptions though, high “refreshes at up to 120Hz” while dynamic “balances smoothness and battery life” so I assume high is also dynamic to a certain extent, just that it favors 120Hz more and consumes more battery.

We’ll get to battery life and 120Hz shortly, but the display is a nice curved OLED, but the factory calibration is way off and the white balance leaned towards a heavy green tint, but you can manually change in the settings. Points were definitely deducted here. Colors were also not as vivid as AMOLED but sacrifices had to be made, I’m just happy it’s OLED with the deep blacks and not an IPS (god forbid).

Battery Life

With a 4800 mAh battery, this phone lasted quite long on a single charge despite using the high refresh rate mode. I got about 6-7 hours of screen on time, and I find that the dynamic refresh rate mode didn’t save that much battery compared to high.

See also

ReviewSmartphone

·April 24, 2022

OnePlus 10 Pro Review: I Wanted To Like It

With competition like Xiaomi packing 120W charging, it’s interesting to see how brands balance pricing by withholding fast-charging tech from cheaper models. Not today tho, this bad boy has crazy fast 66W Honor proprietary fast charging. Definitely a far cry from Apple’s turtle-speed 20W “fast” charging.

That being said, 30 minutes on the charger gives you about 74% of juice, with a full charge taking slightly over an hour. Nothing to shout about but it’s quick enough to give you another day’s juice in a pinch.

I think this is peak bang-for-buck.

Looking at this phone as a whole, It kinda reminds me of the OnePlus golden era. You’ve got plenty of horsepower for your android power user multitasking and blazing-fast charging.

If you want to compare it with my retired OnePlus 6, the Honor 70 has an ultra-premium design, flagship-level camera performance, AND an ultrawide camera, all with even faster charging and a bigger battery. At the same price.

The Hono 70 really shocked me here with its excellent camera performance that can stand side by side with RM3-5,000 flagships from other brands. It’s a complete all-rounded package that leaves nothing much more to desire. You could spend another RM1000 and the only difference you would get is probably a better dual stereo speaker and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The phone offers a lot for an inexpensive sub RM 2,000 price tag. Good phones getting cheap, and cheap phones getting good.