When I first took the Huawei Ascend P7 out of its rather attractive and stylish packaging, my first thought was “wow” and my second was that it reminded me of Sony’s Xperia Z1/Z2.
That second point is no bad thing, of course, Sony’s Xperia models are incredibly slick and rewarding to get to grips with. A big part of Huawei’s pitch with the Ascend P7 is to deliver a premium look and feel in a product that seems “precision engineered” like a high-end camera or watch, and in aiming for that it’s gone down the metal and glass construction route already trod by Sony.
While comparisons are easily drawn, I think it can also fairly be said that the P7 does have its own distinctive character. Picking the handset up I was struck by how lightweight and well balanced it feels in the hand – I have rarely encountered a handset as light as this with the exception of the Apple iPhone 5/5S. Often going hand-in-hand with lightweight builds, the P7 is also extremely thin, but it sits comfortably in the hand as Huawei has made its edges flat rather than tapered. The bezel around the display is also razor thin, a design decision which always improves a phone’s frontage.
The Ascend P7’s silhouette is sharp and angular but with slightly softened and rounded corners; proportionally it is very, very elegant indeed. Personally, I particularly like the way Huawei has also rounded the phone’s bottom edge (which also houses the microUSB port) as it adds some interesting visual flair, but with that said KYM’s Editor Richard took an immediate dislike to it. As with all design features: different strokes.
While that rounded edge appears to be made of a robust and smooth (though not shiny) polycarbonate, the remaining three edges are surrounded by an almost unbroken length of aluminium panelling which sits ever so slightly raised from the bodywork. This features a nice stylish brushed finish and houses the phone’s various buttons, slots and ports. I must applaud Huawei’s implementation of these as they're tremendously subtle yet remarkably clean and refined at the same time.
Along the right-hand side you have the bulk of the controls and ports, with the volume rocker towards the top – it’s a fairly standard volume rocker shape, being a short strip with rounded off ends, but like all the keys it’s made of the same metal as the surround into which it’s embedded and is raised just enough from the phone’s surface to make operation by feel effective, while visually being low-lying enough to blend in with the device’s edging almost seamlessly.
The power key just below it is a similar story, although here it’s a round button sat in a small rounded divot recessed into the bodywork. Both sets of controls have a nice firm operation. Just below the power key is a pair of card slots. I really love the way Huawei has echoed the volume rocker shape here with both slots sitting back-to-back and featuring a flat end where they meet, but a round end where they face away.
While it’s also a hardware feature as much as a design aspect, it’s worth noting Huawei has been very clever here with one slot being a micro SIM and the other having a unique tray designed to accommodate either a second micro SIM or a microSD storage card – the phone features 16GB of onboard storage while card support goes up to 64GB. Lastly, the audio jack is along the top side and rather than the usual bezel design the hole simply sits flush to the edging for an interesting look.
As with the Xperia Z1/Z2, the Huawei Ascend P7 features glass on both front and back, which is once again a bit of a double-edged sword design wise. A glass back does look and feel premium, to be sure, but that has a tendency to wear off pretty quickly when the rear fascia starts picking up as many greasy fingerprints as the touch display. Putting that practical consideration aside for one moment, the actual execution of Huawei’s 7-layer back panel is nothing short of a master stroke of luxurious design. Huawei’s multi-layered texturing isn’t always apparent – at night or generally in the dark the rear will just appear black, but otherwise, every now and then, it’ll catch the light the right way and you’ll see this cool metallic blue mesh design lurking under the surface.
The rest of the back panel is largely minimalist; there’s the silver Huawei logo in the middle, the bezel-edged camera port and flash in the top left, and a narrow speaker at the bottom left. The one fly in the ointment is that official electronics blurb across the bottom. I noticed with Sony’s recent handsets it’s taken to including this presumably required information on a pull-out tab inside the card slots, which serves to prevent the otherwise clean back panel getting its luxury look ruined by bureaucratic text. That would have been a good idea here too.
The display is a 5-inch IPS LCD with a full HD 1080p resolution at 440 pixels-per-inch (ppi). This is a nice size for fairly easy one-handed operation while also being large enough for rewarding multimedia consumption. In terms of visual quality it’s in-line with what I’ve come to expect from full HD IPS setups – rich colour, pure whites, great brightness and clarity (including text), and wide viewing angles. I’m yet to use the phone in bright sunlight so I’ll be sure to check how it stands up for the full review.
The Ascend P7 runs on Android 4.4 KitKat with a new version of Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI). While the UI does include some of KitKat’s new design features (such as the transparent menu elements) it is very much a complete custom overhaul of Android which might feel quite alien to some. There are some interesting things here, including some extensive customisation options, which I will go into more detail with for the full review, but one elephant in the room for this software is how much it looks like iOS 7.
As usual, the camera and battery will require some more thorough road-testing for a useful verdict, but for the say-so it has a 2,500mAh non-removable cell with an “Ultra Power Saving” mode to preserve the juice. Meanwhile the camera setup includes a 13-megapixel sensor (plus LED flash) on the rear and an 8-megapixel on the front. There are some interesting capture features here such as double tapping the volume down key even if the phone is asleep to rapidly capture an important event in as little as 1.2 seconds.
The Huawei Ascend P7 is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 910T processor, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 based chip with 28 nanometre architecture, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core Mali 450MP4 graphics processing unit (GPU). This chip is clocked at 1.8GHz. While my initial impression of the performance is that it’s largely smooth, I have noticed some judders where other recent flagships don’t seem to struggle – notably while installing an app in the background the screen transitions started to stutter. It will be interesting to see how higher performance tasks impact on things.
Overall the Huawei Ascend P7 is quite an impressive specimen. The design is, in my view, extraordinary, despite a few foibles here and there. I’m a little more dubious about the processor hardware and the highly customised software at this stage but I’ll have more to say about these aspects after an extended testing period. Stay tuned for the full review.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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