HONOR X7A

HONOR impressed us with the launch of their mid-range smartphone, the HONOR X9a. Barely a month since its Philippine launch, they're back at it again, this time with a new entry-level X-series smartphone, the HONOR X7a.

- GABRIEL PE

DESIGN

The HONOR X7a retains some of its predecessor's image (HONOR X7) with the double camera bumps at the back and the teardrop notch selfie camera. It comes in three unique colors Midnight Black (our review unit), Titanium Silver, and Ocean Blue.

The phone is mostly plastic but feels durable, thanks to the heft of its massive battery. The midnight black colorway is glossy but not a fingerprint magnet. Additionally, the included jelly case should be able to address that concern.

The HONOR X7a has a 6.74-inch Full View Display that offers decent colors despite being just an IPS LCD panel. It has a 720 x 1600 resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. The display is also TUV Rheinland certified for low blue light emissions.

On top of the phone is the sim card tray. On the right are the volume buttons and the power button that doubles as the side-mounted fingerprint reader. At the bottom are the headphone jack (pretty nice), the USB-C charging port, and the single downward-firing speaker.

HARDWARE

Powering the HONOR X7a is a MediaTek Helios G37 processor with a PowerVR GE8320 GPU. It's not a powerful processor, and it showed during testing, scoring 133040 in Antutu V9.5.4 and 190 for single-core, and 785 for multicore in Geekbench 6.

Our review unit also had 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage that can be expanded via a MicroSD card.

If you're used to a much more powerful smartphone, you'll notice the processor chugging. Still, I found that it can run some light games like League of Legends Wild Rift and Pokemon Go (more on this later).