Honor 7S first impressions: A new kid in the block

Honor 7S offers a well-balanced set of features in the budget phone segment. Here’s how it fares on our first impressions.

Honor 7S comes in three colour options of black, blue and gold. (HT Photo)

Huawei's e-brand Honor launched its cheapest smartphone in India on Tuesday. Priced at ₹6,999, Honor 7S comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB onboard storage.

We spent a brief time with the Honor 7S and here our first impressions of the smartphone.

Honor 7S is a very compact and handy smartphone, having the perfect size for people who don't like large screens. Honor has also managed to squeeze in a 5.45-inch full display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. The display quality isn't great though, with only a HD resolution. However, smartphones competing at the same price like Redmi 5A also offer the same.

While the Honor 7S doesn't look appealing like its senior phones, it has a pretty decent design. We had the blue colour variant of Honor 7S. It also comes in colour options of black and gold.

Some of the first noticeable problems I faced with the Honor 7S was the slow touch response. The phone's touchscreen isn't very comfortable and there was some delay in the touch feedback. During my brief usage, the smartphone was a little slow in opening apps. Even native apps like phone, contacts and messages took quite some time to open and load completely.

For performance, Honor 7S uses a MediaTek MT6737 processor paired with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. For photography, Honor 7S has a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel selfie camera. The camera interface is simple with different filters as an additional feature.

The front camera can also be used for unlocking the smartphone. This is also the only external feature of unlocking device as it doesn't have a fingerprint sensor. I tried out this feature and it worked pretty well. You'll have to press the power button to use face unlock.

Overall, Honor 7S offers a decent pack of features for a budget smartphone. It directly competes with Xiaomi Redmi 5A which also comes with similar configurations.

 WATCH: HONOR 7S UNBOXING