Honor is making a name for itself as the brand to turn to when you want a bang-up smartphone without having to spend a fortune to get one. The Honor 7X is the follow-up to the Honor 6X, which launched last year, and it packs in the must-have features we love to see in smartphones these days — a dual-lens camera, a full-display screen, a metal body, and a fantastic design. After its October 2017 reveal in China, the Honor 7X has been available in the U.S. since December. Then, at CES in January, Honor announced that a gorgeous red version of the 7X will also make its way to the U.S. — and now it’s here.
You can read our Honor 7X review to learn more about the phone, and we’ve also included it in our best cheap phones guide.
Get the Honor 7X in red
At Honor’s CES 2018 press conference, it unveiled a red version of the Honor 7X. It’s available as of February 5 for the same $200 price tag in the U.S. and other markets. We’ve got our hands on this version, and it looks absolutely beautiful. Take a gander:
The red color option is a Valentine’s Day limited edition, which means 20,000 devices are available on the Honor website. The first 100 buyers (in any region) will also get a Honor-branded pair of Monster AM15 headphones as a special gift.
Honor also created a special Valentine’s Day giveaway where couples can enter to win two limited-edition Honor 7X phones by reenacting the first time they met in person on Instagram. If you’re single, Honor hasn’t forgotten about you either. You can also create a video of something you love and share it on Instagram for a chance to win the limited-edition Honor 7X devices.
Release and availability
How much does the Honor 7X cost? An eye-widening $200 in the U.S., and 270 British pounds in the U.K. The U.S. model packs 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, but the international model has 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage space.
The Honor 7X is available now. The phone only supports the GSM network, so it will only work on T-Mobile and AT&T, not Verizon and Sprint.
Tough design
The Honor 7X is the spiritual successor to last year’s Honor 6X, and it looks every bit the part. It has an all-aluminum unibody that’s curved on all four sides, with exceptionally narrow edges to the right and left of the screen. It’s surprisingly tough, with specially designed corner structures that provide a high degree of shock absorption, almost acting like tiny airbags.
Honor took 15 months to get the look and feel of the Honor 7X just right, and went through 28 different prototypes during that time. The effort has paid off. Not only is the phone light and comfortable to hold, but in the striking blue and red colors, it looks very special too.
Features and specification
The Honor 7X’s high-end housing packs a curved 5.9-inch edge-to-edge screen with a 2160 x 1080 pixel resolution and an 18:9 aspect ratio. The screen fits inside a body that’s no bigger than phones with a 5.5-inch screen, due to the change over to an 18:9 aspect ratio display. This means the design takes on the almost borderless look of phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the LG V30. Inside is Huawei’s eight-core Kirin 659 system-on-chip, Mali-T830 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage space on the U.K. model. A MicroSD card slot lets you add up to 256GB.
The Honor 7X doesn’t disappoint when it comes to photography. It has a dual rear camera — a 16-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel secondary sensor — that can capture Portrait Mode-like bokeh shots with in-focus foregrounds and blurred backgrounds. Honor has improved the algorithms for portrait shots, making the phone focus faster, and added new software to make the camera perform better in low light.
The selfie camera has 8 megapixels and a portrait mode, plus a selection of built-in face filters — complete with animation and sound — much like those seen on apps like Snapchat, Snow, and Line’s B612. On the software side of things, the Honor 7X ships with Honor’s custom-designed user interface EMUI 5.1, which is placed over Android 7.1 Nougat. There are some special new features, including a gesture-controlled shutter release for the selfie camera, daytime and nightime screen modes, and a single button split-screen mode, to make the most out of the large screen.
Finally, Honor has included a 3.5mm headphone port on the phone, with its own Histen Audio settings, providing a 3D surround sound effect when headphones are used. It’s exactly what you need for watching movies on the phone.
Updated February 5: Added more information about the red Honor 7X, its release.
