Honor 7C first impressions: Dual cameras, EMUI 8.0 are its strength

Honor 7C will go on sale in India on May 31 via Amazon India. The smartphone is available in 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB variants.

Honor 7C has a premium look and feel to it. (HT Photo)

Honor 7C is a new budget Android smartphone from Huawei's online-only brand. Taking on the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 and Oppo's Realme 1, Honor 7C is available at a starting price of ₹9,999.

The top-end model of the phone is priced at ₹11,999, keeping itself in a close competition with Xiaomi's top-end Redmi phones.

Honor 7C, however, isn't a Redmi Note 5-clone as we have seen multiple brands attempting to do so for the budget Android segment. The Honor smartphone looks to make a difference by implementing a premium look and feel. Featuring a flat metal black panel, the phone has a slim profile and is quite light weight too.

The back panel is neat with a horizontal camera setup on the left top corner, fingerprint sensor at the top centre, and honor engraving at the bottom. On the front, the phone has a 5.99-inch HD+ 18:9 display. The top bezel features camera sensors and speaker whereas the bottom bezel has Honor branding. The phone has on-screen navigation buttons. The right edge houses volume and power buttons whereas the left edge has the dual -SIM + microSD slot.

The Honor 7C feels quite compact with all the necessary buttons such as fingerprint sensor and volume well within easy reach. The smartphone looks quite trendy blue colour option. Honor 7C is available in black and gold colour options as well.

Apart from an impressive design, Honor 7C is also quite big on software features. Running on EMUI 8.0 (based on Android 8.0 Oreo), the smartphone comes with a range of features such as face recognition to unlock the phone. There's also a Ride mode, similar to Samsung's Bike mode, which allows users to customise responses to calls when you're riding.

Another useful application is Launch which allows users to optimise battery usage for each application on the smartphone. Users can choose between optimisation of battery usage automatically and manually. Gesture controls such as flip to mute and three-finger screenshot are pretty useful. Overall, the UI felt smooth and easy to navigate, despite being one of the heavily customised versions of Android. READ: Huawei EMUI 8.0 (Android Oreo) OS: Here are its top new features

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Honor brings dual-camera to under ₹10,000 category. (HT Photo)

Honor brings dual-camera to under ₹10,000 category. (HT Photo)

Honor also takes a pride in stressing that Honor 7C is one of the few smartphones under ₹10,000 to offer a dual-camera setup. The phone has 13-megapixel and 2-megapixel sensors with bokeh and wide-aperture mode. The camera UI is pretty easy to get familiar with. Swiping left on the screen will serve you a bunch of modes such as HDR, video, panorama, filters, and watermark. You can also modes such as Document Scan, Watermark, and Good Food (for richer colours of food). The camera, however, misses out on the Pro mode. The 8-megapixel selfie camera seems pretty decent for the price point. As expected, the smartphone comes preloaded with a beauty mode. There's also a front flash, which users can customise depending upon their preferences.

Honor 7C has a metal back panel. (HT Photo)

Honor 7C has a metal back panel. (HT Photo)

Honor 7C seems like a well packaged smartphone. The dual-camera setup, decent selfie camera, and premium look and feel certainly work for the phone. The performance bit is something we need to investigate more. It runs on Snapdragon 450 SoC with 4GB of RAM. Xiaomi is offering Redmi Note 5 Pro with Snapdragon 636 processor, which is a top-of-the-line chipset under the Snapdragon 600-series and is said to be 40% faster than the Snapdragon 630 SoC. But newer chipsets don't necessarily mean the phone has better performance. We believe Honor 7C is going to attract customers who are looking for a premium design with good camera, and don't want to spend a bomb. We will be giving out our final verdict in our detailed review. Until then stay tuned.