HONOR 70 REVIEW

INTRODUCTIONS 

It's been almost two years since Honor split from its parent company Huawei. This means that - unlike Huawei - it can sell phones with Google apps and services pre-installed, which means it's really worth considering if you live in a country where Honor sells phones. This includes several European markets, but not the US, at least not yet.

But while this change has allowed recent Honor phones like last year's Honor 50 and Magic4 Pro to compete in a crowded Android smartphone market, the brand has yet to find its unique selling point. Its phones have not exceeded expectations in any area, be it camera or display quality, performance or length of software support.

That doesn't change with Honor's latest international phone, the Honor 70. In the last week I've been using the phone, I haven't found anything I'd consider a compromise. Everything is fine: battery life is great, camera performance and quality are adequate, and overall performance is solid. But there's also nothing that stands out enough to recommend the Honor 70 over any number of other cheaper mid-range phones released this year. In need of a show-stopping feature, the Honor 70 starts at £480 (roughly $566) for the 8GB RAM and 128GB storage model. Stepping up to £530 (roughly $625) gets you 256GB of storage. I was using the latest model.

 out and has almost none.

The front of the Honor 70 looks very similar to last year's Honor 50 with its 6.67-inch curved OLED display and front-facing camera cutout. It's an always-on 1080p display with a dynamic refresh rate of 120Hz and an in-display fingerprint sensor that was fast enough and reliable that I hardly noticed him.

What I did have a problem with is the fact that it's curved, with the sides of the display disappearing around the left and right sides of the phone. Yes, it gives the phone a premium look similar to flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and Pixel 6 Pro, and the bezels on the left and right sides of the screen look smaller than they actually are. However, it does mean that the sides of the display have a slightly shadowy feel to them because you're always looking at them off-axis, and the curved edges have a habit of concentrating light reflections into bright lines at the edges of the display. I've been more forgiving of curved displays in the past, but in the case of the Honor 70, the phone's display is less functional,

 reducing usable space with very little benefit.

On the back, the design of the Honor 70 is a bit sleeker than the Honor 50. The two prominent circular camera bumps are no longer connected by a raised section, giving the back of the phone a simpler and cleaner look. In the UK, the phone is available in three colors: silver, black, and the green version I'm using. There's no official IP rating for dust and water resistance, no headphone jack, and no expandable storage.                                                                                                                                      

The Honor 70 runs Android 12 out of the box and uses Honor's own Magic UI 6.1 software. I ended up loving the Magic UI, but it took a bit of work to get there—replacing the ugly and cluttered SwiftKey software keyboard (which kept trying to lowercase my username) for Gboard, uninstalling half a dozen bloatware apps (sorry, TrainPal, Booking.com, Lords Mobile, Game of Sultans and more) and re-enable the app drawer.

Once I got it set up to my liking, I found the Magic UI to be nice, a clean Android launcher that doesn't get in the way too much.

The Honor 70's Snapdragon 778G Plus processor easily keeps up with everyday tasks. Browsing through visually dense apps like Twitter is beautiful and smooth on the phone's 120Hz display, and I didn't experience any significant issues when switching between apps. One sore point is the phone's haptics, which can feel too aggressive and cheap compared to the gentle clicks you feel on other phones.

Speaker quality is average, with sound produced by the phone's single set of downward-facing speakers. They're loud enough that I could listen to a podcast out loud while washing dishes, but overall they sound tinny and hollow, and I found it harder than normal to make out dialogue in some YouTube videos with excessive background noise.

Honor says the Honor 70 will get two years of Android updates and three years of security updates. That's a pretty typical period of software support for Android phones, and matches what OnePlus offers with the mid-range Nord 2T, for example. But elsewhere in the Android ecosystem, Google and Samsung are taking things much further. The Pixel 6A gets five years of security updates and is more affordable at £399 (around $466), though strangely Google refuses to specify how many OS updates it will get, while Samsung promises four years of OS updates and five years of security. repairs to your recent Galaxy A53 for £399. Even the £399 Nothing Phone 1 should (eventually) get three years of Android updates and four years of security updates. I don't think we're quite at the point where simply offering three years of security updates should be considered a barrier, 

 but we're getting close.

That's a lot of complaints, so let's talk about something I really liked about the Honor 70 - the battery life. I averaged a little less than 6.5 hours of screen-on time per day from the phone and was constantly charging it, with more than 50 percent left in the evening. After a day of heavy use, with the phone's screen on for 90 minutes while using it for cycling routes and streaming music to Bluetooth headphones, I ended the day with a 35 percent charge.

The honor includes a 66W fast charger in the package. It supports the Honor SuperCharge standard as well as Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, but there's no mention of Power Delivery (PD) support, which might explain why it wasn't able to charge my MacBook. I found that the phone could go from empty to 52 percent in 20 minutes, 72 percent in 30 minutes, and fully charged in less than 50 minutes. That's not as fast as the cheaper £369 (around $431) OnePlus Nord 2T, which can charge to 100 percent in less than half an hour, but it'll still be more than fast enough for most people. There is wireless charging, which is still a relative rarity at this price.