Huawei has a long range of devices targeting almost all ages and all budget levels. One of those ranges is the Y-series that has been considered among lower mid-range category. But with the launch a new Huawei Y7 Prime 2018, it seems they moved the model to further down at an entry-level category.
While the original Y7 Prime of last year costed Rs. 25,000, the new model cost only PKR 20,000/- At this point, I actually appreciate the company for decreasing a price significantly for a newer model. But They actually have protected themselves as well from a loss. They didn’t only added new features but also degraded some components which could have allowed them to put lower price tag.
The thing is, for that 5000 rupees lower price tag, will you get something as really an upgrade? That’s what for we are here to tell.
The Y7 Prime 2018 didn’t let us down with its first impression as it brought quite a nice upgrades to its look and feel. Additionally there is dual-camera for a fun photography which may be an interest for many of you. We’ll check them all here and see if they are worth the price.
Let just go through the features of Y7 Prime 2018. The phone comes with 6-inch HD+ 18:9 FullView display and 2.5D curved glass. The phone features Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 Octa-core Mobile Platform along with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage.
| Announced | March 2018 |
| Software | Android 8.0 Oreo EMUI 8.0 |
| Dimension | 152.3 x 72.8 x 8.4mm |
| Weight | 155 grams |
| Display | 5.99-inch IPS LCD Display 1440×720 Resolution. 18:9 Infinity Display Pixel Density 269ppi |
| Chipset | Snapdragon 430 (MSM8937) CPU: 8x ARM Cortex A53 1.4GHz GPU: Adreno 505 Modem: X6 (150Mbps/75Mbps) |
| Memory | 3GB RAM 32GB Internal Storage External Memory up to 256GB |
| Camera | Rear: 13MP+2MP PDAF, LED flash Front: 8MP FF, soft-LED flash Video: 1080p/30fps |
| Battery | 3000 mAh Charging 5V-2A |
| Network | 4G/LTE, 3G, 2G |
| Connectivity | Dual-SIM + MicroSD card GPS, WiFi 802.11 B/G/N, Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, |
| Sensors | Fingerprint Sensor Proximity Sensor Ambient Light Sensor Compass Gravity Sensor |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi Direct Wi-Fi Hot Spot Bluetooth, Micro USB |
| Price | PKR 19,999/- ~USD 175 |
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Update: Video review added below.
Let’s have a look what we get in the retail package.
Y7 Prime 2018 comes in a simple white box with popup out style. The retail box has pretty much everything you usually have with a new smartphone but it brings some more things such as a back cover and a screen protective film
Huawei has been making good quality phones in almost all price ranges. Y7 Prime 2018 is also something to appreciate for its build and quality. Design wise it’s not that much different from any other smartphone, specially at first impression it looks more like the Mate 10 lite.
Y7 Prime 2018 features a 5.99-inch screen with 2.5D curved glass on top. Huawei didn’t mention if the screen has a scratch resistant glass but it sure does not have oleophobic coating. Really not sure why Huawei doesn’t choose to to make it less fingerprint prone. Once it catches the fingerprints, you will spend a lot of time cleaning it or have to wipe it with wet cloth. That’s actually the bad thing I always tell about mid-range devices from Huawei.
The resolution sticks to 1440 by 720 pixels. I usually don’t object on this resolution as long as the screen size is smaller. But when they make a large screen like six inches, they need to take care of the resolution as well. It leaves you with less sharp content. The pixel density is around 269ppi which is not that great for sure.
The good thing is the wider aspect ratio of 18:9 which is just according to trend and has its own objectives to show content in more space. The feature is not available to all apps by default, however a button is provided to expand the app if applicable.
Size of the phone isn’t that compact as with the larger screen size than its predecessor, the Y7 Prime 2018 is still a 5 cm larger vertically. Thanks to the expanded display that we have larger screen to body ratio of around 76%.
Now that we are talking about the front side, the top bezel has all those standard sensors, the earpiece in the middle, the front camera on the left side side and a soft LED flash on the right which is not so visible.
Y7 Prime 2018 has an 8-megapixel camera on the front. The phone sports standard sensors to run basic functions of a smartphone that include ambient light and proximity sensors inside the top bezel. Additionally the phone has a compass and gravity sensor which are not usually visible. No special sensors like gyroscope are there.
So you should take it in mind that you won’t be able to have fun with virtual reality content. If you are truly looking for an entry-level smartphone for such a price, I believe you should have had it in mind. We can wait until a company bring those special features to entry-level.
The bottom bezel has only a Huawei branding printed and there are no capacitive keys for navigation. The software based on-screen navigation buttons are provided.
Power and volume buttons are on the right side as usually they are on most smartphones. The left side of the phone hosts the slot for dual-SIM cards and a micro SD card. It’s not a hybrid one but can serve with both the SIM cards and micro SD card simultaneously.
Top side of the phone is clean and doesn’t have anything. Everything is on the bottom – a 3.5mm audio jack, micro USB port, a loudspeaker and a mouthpiece.
The most attractive part of the phone design is its sides. Though the glossy finish on the sides of the phone is too good to look at, it’s also prone to catching fingerprints. But that’s also the case with the display, so it’s still better not so visible on the glossy sides and you can clean them too.
If you are assuming those shiny sides to be some kind of premium metal, then don’t. It’s plastic, and so is the whole body. However they mimic as a metal very well as you don’t really need it to be metal for price you are spending on it.
The build quality is really good as always been the case with Huawei devices. It’s not that plastic we have previously seen on older galaxies. The device we got here for review is the Black variant that has a matte finish.
Those polished and rounded edges of the phone help to grip easily. Handling is fine and comfortable with 155 grams of the phone’s weight and 7.8mm thickness.
Coming to the back of the phone, there is a pair of 13-megapixel camera and a 2-megapixel camera. The dual camera has a support of single LED flash enclosed into a horizontal module raised above the base panel. Dual-camera does impress on paper, but we’ll see if this actually compete better in its price range.
Just to the right of the camera module, there is a secondary microphone for noise cancellation. That mic also helps in recording dual-channel audio.
Below the camera in the middle, that’s the fingerprint scanner on my preferred place. That’s a perfect placement for your index finger to reach. As long as I used it on regular basis, the fingerprint seemed to work just as it would in any other Huawei smartphone. However, sometime a rare delay proved that it’s running a low-end processor.
Huawei Y7 Prime 2018 runs Android 8.0 Oreo with custom software skin on top – EMUI 8.0. That’s another upgrade but it can also be shipped to Y7 Prime as it’s just a software. However, it indeed has its quality features over the previous versions which you can’t overlook
First of all, you get kind launchers, one the Huawei’s traditional app launcher which has a clean home screens with app icons and folders. The other one is a more common launcher with an app drawer. By default it comes with the Huawei’s traditional launcher, while the app drawer mode can be enabled from settings. Choose as it suits you but this feature has been there since EMUI 5.1 and is available in devices running Android 7.1.
Software features like Eye Comfort with manual display temperature override has always been a plus point. Phone Manager is also good to have important things like system optimization, data and traffic management, harassment filter for restricting numbers to call you or send you text.
EMUI 8 has a very organised behavior of user experience, taking from the pull-down notifications to the phone management.
The fingerprint scanner on Y7 Prime 2018 is no different than other mid-range Huawei devices. With the first start, registering fingerprints is fast like always but with time and continuous use of the phone makes the scanner less faster. Take the reason of having an entry-level processor that can’t keep up with the long run usage of the phone. A reset may help in this regard but with a fresh start.
In addition to the fingerprint scanner, Huawei has added the AI powered facial recognition algorithm. The Y7 Prime 2018 can automatically detect 1,024 points of a human face and perform high accuracy
mapping. Face unlock can be performed within milliseconds as stated by the company. It’s fast when we tested but it’s rather less accurate in darker environment.
The vital function of a smartphone is always its performance and that comes from the core of it. Y7 Prime 2018 is powered by a Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 430 chipset with octa-core processor. All the eight cores of ARM’s Cortex A53 are clocked at up to 1.4GHz. The chip is also bundled with Adreno 505 GPU. The phone comes with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, which is really a good thing for an entry-level smartphone to fulfil today’s tasks. It’s more a similar bundle as we have recently reviewed Infinix S3.
Considering regular usage, the performance was left no reservation for day to day use. Basic gaming and some mid-level 3D games were also good but don’t expect them to run fluently. You shouldn’t expect anything better than an entry-level smartphone.
Benchmark scores can tell you where it stands among its class. Y7 Prime 2018 ran through Geekbench 4, AnTuTu 7, Vellamo, Basemark OS II and Basemark ES3.1. You can check the following scores in respective order.
It’s impressive that Huawei has done better with a lower version of the chipset than in last year’s Y7 Prime as the scores are significantly higher than its predecessor.
Vellamo, Basemark OS II, Basemark ES 3.1
One downgrade from the predecessor is its battery and it’s huge jump-down from a 4000 mAh to a 3000mAh battery. However we have seen the phone run progressively, may be due to an upgraded and well optimised software. So we can keep our negative point with us for now as the lower battery capacity didn’t actually create a major trouble.
A full charge may give a up to 15 hours with moderate usage that does not include heavy gaming, GPS navigation or long video playbacks. Connectivity via Wi-Fi or 4G may also differ the battery timing. Good thing is that the Huawei’s Ultra Power saving is present in Y7 Prime 2018.
An upgrade of the few in Huawei Y7 Prime 2018 is its camera. The phone comes with a dual-camera setup like most recent releases. It has a 13-megapixel main camera along with the support of a 2MP camera for depth mapping. It helps the system to produce photos by distinguishing background from the foreground. You mostly know the element as “Bokeh”, that’s the effect today these dual-camera smartphone try to mimic by the software algorithms instead of optical components in dedicated cameras.
Where I am not impressed is the Camera UI on this smartphone. It’s like Huawei really didn’t want to give it a go with all that featureful camera interface in Huawei’s other smartphones. I am not sure either what caused them to hold those features, as the system is running on the latest software as well as that entry-level chipset also have support for most camera features.
Well, Huawei seemed to just put it on the slot to distinguish it a bit from its mid-range counterparts. That’s not a positive thing though – I’m not impressed.
Here is it. The first viewfinder with flash, aperture mode, beauty mode and front/rear camera switch. Then on the left page, you get a limited set of modes with photo, video, HDR, Panorama, Filter and Watermark. Settings are pretty much similar offering a rear-used set of options with resolution.
Let’s just move on and check the camera quality.
Daylight shots were decent with well controlled colors and noise is controlled. Sometimes the images came soft but mostly they were well focused. Distant leaves and grass usually smudge and doesn’t give a cooler look when looked at 1:1 shot.
For this price range, the dynamic range is good but it’s not so good at controlling harsh contrast and came up with clipped highlights. The bad thing is that its HDR feature is just like as it’s not really there. We’d hardly see a difference in a photo with and without HDR enabled.
For this entry-level smartphone, low-light shots were mostly similar to what many other smartphones have have done in this price range. It, however maintained the colors accurately, edges of the subjects continued to remain soft. For nearer subjects you could use flash which usually works fine but overexposes the subject at occasions.
The most impressive thing in the camera is its aperture mode that controls bokeh effect on the background. It indeed is a good thing for fun and share beautiful portraits in your social network. For those who didn’t know, it blurs out the background to distinct a foreground subject in the image.
The phone has an 8-megapixel camera on the front which has is fixed focus image sensor. Where now a days every other smartphone is offering bokeh mode on selfies, yet it’s software based and not so appealing but it does look different than a flat picture. Unfortunately, being a dual-camera on the back side and having an aperture mode for rear camera, the Y7 Prime 2010 doesn’t have the feature for front camera. There is a beauty mode however.
The phone can record up to 1080p video footage at 30 frames per second. We didn’t have a sample for that. The review will be updated once the footage is ready to publish.
Even though found some features which are the good ones for an entry-level smartphone but remains an entry-level smartphone. Considering the price factor, if we don’t go far, there is the Infinix Hot S3 which was launched just around the same time as Y7 Prime 2018.
With the exact price tag and very similar core hardware components, Y7 Prime 2018 brings you a dual-camera setup. Still the picture quality from its camera isn’t that good to have significant lead over Hot S3 but Y7 Prime 2018’s camera brings some bright and more realistic colors to the scene. On the other hand you get a bokeh effect with Y7 Prime’s camera so it indeed has a plus point in that department.
Other significant factor is lower battery capacity of 3000mAh as the Hot S3 shipped with the 4000mAh. There is indeed a big difference in practical use but its sure depends, how aggressive usage of a smartphone you have. Y7 Prime can still serve you better if you are a moderate user.
The hardware on a device worth Rs. 20,000, is also currently the best you can get. That 720p display and Snapdragon 430 are sure for entry-level smartphones, so you don’t have anything to abuse unless another competitor brings a better option in that price tag.
Or you can add around 5000 in your budget and get a better model Huawei Y9 2018, that is most similar to Mate 10 Lite as a mid-range performer with Kirin 659 processor and four cameras as well as a large 4000mAh battery.
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