Huawei launched its full-view display smartphone Huawei Y7 Prime 2018 with the dual-camera on the back. It comes as a successor to the last year’s Y7 Prime but as we have mentioned earlier, it steps down on some features with much lower price tag.
Costing PKR 19,999/- or (~USD 175), the Y7 Prime 2018 lies among the entry-level Android smartphones. This surely is an attractive price if you just take it as a newer model to some last year’s model of certain phone. But the company did some manipulation to derive your decision on buying this phone.
It gets the new trendy full-view display with wider aspect ratio and narrow bezels around the screen. That’s what you see when you first look at it, and that’s exactly the first impression. Frankly, it wins your mind’s state of buying. But just take a look at it if you have a plan to buy this next model of your existing Y7 Prime.
First of all, here it is the exploded version of (not the phone itself but) the phone’s packaging.
Y7 Prime 2018 comes in a simple airtight white box with popup out style. What you get in the box are pretty much standard items – the charger, the USB cable and the earphones.
Among some firms, Huawei is also one that gives you two additional things usually in a retail package – the back cover and a protective film. Not so special, it’s a transparent silicon back cover but it indeed is the demand of most smartphone buyers today. You may not prefer to use covers and screen protective films or tempered glass, but others might do. So offering these two things as bundled items in a retail box should always be appreciative.
This transparent silicon cover has some gradient pattern as well which gives a nice and eye-catching visuals.
Now looking at the back of the phone, let’s just start from the rear elements first.
Huawei Y7 Prime 2018 as some upgrades over the last year’s Y7 Prime – Rear dual-camera is the one. It’s a pair of 13-megapixel and 2-megapixel camera along with a dual-tone LED flash. The dual-cam configuration allows you to take nice looking portraits or any photo with blurred background (aka bokeh effect). The secondary 2MP camera is there to support that feature specially. During the first run, I felt that, that’s it with the camera features. I couldn’t find more of them, there in the native camera user interface. But we’ll see later how does it perform in the wild.
Then right there, the fingerprint scanner is on my preferred place – rear-middle location for perfect reach of your index finger. The performance of the sensor seems to be as good as other Huawei smartphones (low-end or mid-range of course) but Y7 Prime seems to catch some delay if it’s running a load of apps.
So, the delay – why that’s so? Well, we talked about some downgrades, right? It’s probably the processor. Huawei didn’t upgrade the processor in this successor model. In fact the company didn’t even keep it intact. They instead downgraded it a little bit.
Y7 Prime 2018 is powered by the Snapdragon 430 SoC which should not be so different than the 435 of last year’s Y7 Prime. But it sure is an older model of the processor. But this entry-level processor does impact on the performance of some features – such as this fingerprint scanner at the least.
Coming on the front of the phone, the 2018 edition of Y7 Prime joins the league of wider aspect ratio displays. That also comes with little narrowed down bezels. Not as narrow as many others have brought to the market but it’s significantly narrower than its predecessor.
The display resolution remains intact at 720p but with little more pixels vertically as the aspect ratio is wider on this model – it’s 2:1 (or 18:9 more familiar) as compared to the standard 16:9 aspect ratio of Y7 Prime. This all technical thing adds exactly 160 pixels to the wider side of the display. It’s now 1440×720 display resolution on a 6-inch screen that serves at the pixel density of ~269ppi. Now that’s only a little difference if compared to the 267ppi of original Y7 Prime.
So technically, the sharpness will remain similar to what you used to get on Y7 Prime, though a slightly larger display in a quite similar sized phone is sure a plus-point.
The top bezel on the front hosts those same components you usually see on every smartphone – the front-facing camera, an earpiece and some hidden sensors. Plus you get a soft-LED flash on Y7 Prime 2018.
On the other side, the lower bezel has the “HUAWEI” branding while the standard Android navigation is right above there on the screen.
Though it’s all plastic but built nicely like every other manufacturer has now reached the level building plastic mimicking well as metal. Y7 Prime has just the same matte finish on the back. The camera module is little raised above the base panel.
The most appealing part is “the sides” of the phone. It’s glossy finish is nice but also prone to catching fingerprints. You can clean them tough. The power and volume buttons are on the right side.
The phone has a 3.5mm audio jack and a loud speaker on the bottom side. As well, expectedly the phone only has a micro USB connectivity.
The bad thing is that the phone doesn’t support fast charging and comes only with a 1 ampere standard charger.
Users who hate replacing one of the SIM cards with a micro SD card would love to have them all in the Y7 Prime 2018. It’s not a hybrid SIM slot and you can place two SIM cards and a memory card all at once without giving up on one thing.
Coming over at the software side, َY7 Prime 2018 gives you a punch of Android 8.0 Oreo software out-of-the-box. The most recent and up to date software is always welcomed. The phone gets quick upgrade after the first start and is currently, at the time of writing, it’s running at March 1st security patch.
Another downgrade in the phone is the battery capacity. Unlike the original Y7 Prime’s 4000 mAh, the new 2018 edition has a significantly low battery capacity of 3000 mAh. It’s up to the software optimization how well the battery live up to the usage. We’ll test that during our detailed review coming in the following days. Keep an eye over it. For now, you can compare the new Y7 Prime 2018 with the original Y7 Prime to review all the ins and outs.
