Honor 7 is now official. Goes upmarket with a fingerprint scanner and greater voice controls

Huawei has finally announced its new Honor 7, which will replace its current Honor 6 smart phone. The Honor 6 is one of our favourite 5″ flagship devices which is now going for RM899. The Honor brand is supposedly Huawei’s answer to the growing demand of high spec smart phones with a more affordable price tag.

With the new Honor 7, it looks like the aggressive sub-brand is taking a more premium step. Like its predecessor, the Honor 7 appears to be better than the current Huawei P8 flagship and it even shares some similarities with its larger Ascend Mate 7 phablet.

For starters, the Honor 7 gets an aluminium alloy shell for both front and back which not only gives it better durability but it also helps to improve thermal efficiency. The front gets a slightly larger 5.2″ Full HD display, which is similar to its current Huawei P8. Powering the device is their top of the line Kirin 935 64-bit Octa-Core processor which utilises 4x A53 Cores @ 2.2GHz + 4x A53 Cores @ 1.5GHz. This is mated to 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM and depending on variant, you get either 16GB or 64GB of on-board storage. The Honor 7 is also a dual-SIM 4G LTE device and the secondary SIM slot also accepts microSD expansion up to 128GB.

Camera is quite a big deal for the Honor 7. The back gets a 20MP f/2.0 Sony IMX230 Exmor RS sensor which comes with fast Phase Detection Auto Focus. Meanwhile the front gets a 8MP f/2.4 selfie camera with 1.4micron pixel size, a 26mm wide angle lens and a soft flash for better illumination. Like most Chinese smart phones, it gets their latest version of their auto beautification feature.

Powering the Honor 7 is a similar capacity 3,100mAh battery as the predecessor but now it supports quick charge that does 50% in just 30 minutes. Also included at the back is a new generation one touch fingerprint scanner which claims to unlock in just 0.5 seconds.

Another major highlight is the Honor 7’s voice controls which you can get it to launch apps or play music without waking your device physically, similar to the Moto X. On the left side, there’s a dedicated button which calls up “ZhiLing”, supposedly Honor’s answer to the likes of Siri and Google Now. For now, it looks like this is applicable for the Chinese market and we’re not too sure if this will be rolled out for our region. Overall, the Honor 7 is 8.5mm thick and weighs 157 grams, which is heavier and thicker than the current Honor 6 at 7.5mm and 130 grams.

According to GizChina, the Honor 7 with 16GB storage starts from 1,999 CNY (about RM1,217) and it goes all the way up to 2,499 CNY (about RM1,521) for the 64GB version. Out of the box, it runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop with EMUI 3.1.

For more info, visit Honor 7’s product page.