Hands-on review: Honor 70 | E&ampT Magazine

While last year’s Honor 60 was its first major release since the split, with product development times lasting up to 24 months it stuck rigidly to the design principles of its former owner.

Its new flagship device does not sway far from the mid-range sector that the firm has always targeted, offering features roughly on par with the top end with some key compromises.

While hardly disappointing, at £480 the Honor 70 also fails to wow in any particular area, and except for the selfie camera leaves little to get excited about.

The display covers almost the entire front of the device, curving slightly at the edges, with a “holepunch” style selfie camera at the top. While curved edges were once the preserve of premium phones, the industry as a whole has largely moved away from this design choice as it can make for some awkward touchscreen interactions at the edges.

Case in point – Samsung, which was the first to introduce curved screens on phones, all but abandoned them for its Galaxy S22 line-up of phones this year, returning to flat screens across the range for the first time since 2016’s Galaxy S7.

The Honor 70’s display targets an equivalent 1080p resolution, which is completely adequate if not exceptional. The screen is bright enough to be visible even in direct sunlight when wearing sunglasses, but despite being an OLED, it does not dim as far as one might expect. The in-screen fingerprint reader functions well most of the time but can randomly become unusable on occasion, requiring a restart of the device. This is presumably a software glitch that can be patched out further down the line.

Honor has developed its own Android variant, known as Magic UI, which is based on Android 12. The firm has opted to stick to the older button style quick settings in its notification drawer, rather than go for the longer, elongated style now used in Google’s stock variant of Android, which can sometimes feel like wasted space. While not the prettiest implementation of Android, Magic does the job in a perfunctory manner that doesn’t rock the Android boat.

While it doesn’t make many drastic changes to the UI, it does introduce a “floating window” feature that allows you to display apps in windows on top of the home screen or other apps. This became quite annoying and needed to be turned off as it was too easy to open apps in that mode accidentally when accessing them from the notification panel.

Battery life is above average, squeezing out two days from its relatively high usage is entirely possible, even while hotspotting other devices and significant camera usage. The dual SIM card slot comes in handy for travelling, although it unfortunately lacks a memory card slot for expanding the storage. With a minimum 128GB storage capacity on the cheapest variant of the Honor 70, this memory limitation should not be too onerous for most users, and an upgrade to 256GB storage only costs an extra £20. The device also follows the trend of removing the headphone jack, which could be a deal-breaker for people who don’t want to rely on Bluetooth for their audio output.

The back of device holds three camera sensors – a 54MP primary sensor with an f/1.9 aperture, a 50MP ultrawide sensor with an f/2.2 aperture and a 2MP depth sensor which helps bring realistic bokeh effects to shots if desired.

The primary sensor works well in well-lit scenarios, capturing colours vibrantly. While the colour reproduction may be slightly overblown for some, there have been much worse examples of artificial vibrancy in recent devices.

The sensor can be inconsistent when capturing shots with a broad range of lighting scenarios, for example a dark room with a bright window outside. It’s often a choice between a well-lit interior, but completely overblown exterior or muddy details inside with a more accurate capture through the window. To be fair, these are typically challenging shots for any camera and sometimes the software makes use of an interpolation trick where details from both the exterior and interior show up well.

The primary sensor’s night shots are variable in quality – while capable of capturing a scene in poor lighting conditions, noise and fuzz can dominate the image and blur any distant details. It also presents an unrealistically bright image that fails to capture the vibe of night shots in favour of greater visibility. This can be accounted for in the Pro mode that allows fine controls over exposure, white balance and other settings, but it’s fiddly to use.

The ultrawide camera has a resolution almost as high as the primary sensor and takes great shots in the right scenario. This lens also provides the camera with macro functionality – a little-used feature that smartphone makers continue to insist on including.

The selfie camera is great, and the one area where the Honor 70 truly excels. It’s a 32MP sensor for one, which means you don’t need to make major resolution compromises just to get selfie shots, and it does a reasonable attempt at bokeh effects if desired.

It’s easy to argue that Honor’s latest flagship gets most things right, although it doesn’t have a “wow” factor to help it stand out from an already crowded field. At £479, there are lots of alternatives such as the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE or Google’s Pixel 6a. The S21 FE has much lower resolution cameras but a more powerful chipset. The Pixel 6a is over £100 cheaper but also lacks high=resolution sensors like the Honor 70. However, Google has typically been very good at making up for slightly underpowered camera hardware with excellent AI processing. On balance, you still get more bang for your buck on the Honor 70 if cameras are your thing, but its other features are firmly in ‘whelming’ territory.