Honor 70 review, it has style and improves where it was needed

Honor 70 review

Presented during IFA 2022 together with other products of the brand and already available for purchase, Honor 70 has arrived in our country in a single variant (there is no "Pro") which aims to improve the product iteratively hit store shelves last year.

We have been testing the Honor 70 for about two weeks and can assure you that it is a smartphone that improves exactly where it was needed most! - th_mobilelabs_d_mh2_1 slot id: th_mobilelabs_d_mh2 "); }

Beautiful, light and handy but still not very original

Honor 70 is a mid-range smartphone that can boast a build quality until a few years ago reserved for the top of the premium range . The bezels that taper to the sides where the curved glass panels at both the front and back meet, the beautiful and large AMOLED display and an assembly that leaves no room for creaks or defects. There is nothing about this device that suggests at first glance that the selling price is lower than that of a modern flagship.

Unlike the flagships, however, Honor 70 maintains a slim profile (less than 8mm) and a low weight (less than 180g, also thanks to the plastic frames). The design lines don't change much when compared to those of the Honor 50 and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The only note that can be made to Honor, once again, is that it is the same design as other products of the former Huawei parent company and this lack of originality keeps the company so tied to the old brand that it could create confusion to the eyes. audience.


The only real problem with this Honor 70, a smartphone that has been improved in virtually every respect compared to its predecessor, is its lack of originality, a theme that will return throughout the narrative arc of this review. For the rest it is a valid and extremely pleasant product to use, even when calculating the price range in which it is inserted and its direct competition.




Compared to the model that preceded it here in Italy, Honor 50, the brand's new numeric series smartphone is proposed with a slightly larger display but which keeps all the other excellent features we have unchanged. appreciated in the past. AMOLED panel, adequate and more than sufficient FHD + resolution, refresh rate that can automatically vary between 60Hz and 120Hz, decent brightness and color pleasantness.

The optical fingerprint reader positioned in the lower part of the display is quite accurate and fast. Not one of the best we've tried but for the price range it's perfectly average.

Small updates that improve the experience

Even from the point of view of the internal hardware this Honor 70 does not aim to revolutionize but consolidates what was already the excellent complete package proposed previously.

To move everything we find a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G + SoC, practically a higher clocked chip version than last year's model, accompanied by 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal memory.

The benchmarks, therefore, do not differ much from the past model and the user experience remained virtually unchanged. Honor 70 is therefore a smartphone that is always fluid and responsive, which never shows jamming or drops in performance. The most recent games work practically without problems even by raising the graphic quality and, as in the case of Genshin Impact, if you notice sporadic drops in framerate it is possible to eliminate these hiccups by limiting the rendering of less influential details, such as quality. of reflections and water, or by setting a limit to 30fps, the same that in some titles take advantage of the living room consoles and Nintendo Switch.





It is perfectly in able to manage even long gaming sessions despite not being a gaming smartphone, only it cannot be expected to position itself at the top of the performance ranking because it is not a top of the range and does not target the user who wants the most hardware fast and recent. Honor's goal with this product is to offer a fluid and responsive experience on every occasion in everyday life, without emptying your bank account to do so, and I can confirm that the brand has hit the mark in this regard. The choice of internal components is well weighted for this result.

Smartphone Geekbench 5 Geekbench ML 3DMark PCMark Work 3.0 Speedometer 2.0 Jetstream 2 Single-core Multi-core CPU GPU NNAPI Wild Life Wild Life

Stress Test Performance - - Honor 70 812 2902 366 340 842 2665

(16.00 fps) 2667 - 2592

(97.2%) 13025 59.87 (± 0.59) 98619 Honor 50 783 2974 391 931 613 2508

(15.00 fps) 2514 - 2486

(98.9%) 12349 61.04 (± 0.59) 86044 Samsung Galaxy A53 739 1845 227 607 360 2293

(13.7 fps) 2290 - 2118

(89.3%) 11854 51.5 (± 0.56) 38847 Oppo Reno8 Lite 692 2004 226 535 369 1218

(7.30 fps) 1216 - 1211

(99.6%) 7749 43.1 (± 0.61) 60739


Unlike Nothing Phone (1), which took advantage of the new revision of the Qualcomm chip to implement wireless charging, Honor 70 left out this convenience.

It's not a real problem, also because the extra space available was used for a larger battery, now 4800mAh, which is still recharged at 66W with the power supply included in the package. In fact, it only takes 20 minutes to go from a completely discharged smartphone to 60% autonomy.

Reliable software, Honor takes no risks

Ed here we are again talking about the "Achilles heel", if it can be defined as such, of this Honor 70. On board is installed Android 12 with MagicUI 6.1 interface and it is exactly as you can expect it if you have already used an Honor smartphone (or Huawei of the past).

As we also repeated in the review of Honor Magic4 Pro and in that of Honor 50 before him, the company needs to reinvent itself and it needs to do it quickly. The software that drives Honor products, while extremely fluid, responsive and fast, is stagnant. Both graphically and in terms of functionality, it remained anchored to the Huawei base from which it was derived before the separation. For example, the now universal gestures are missing to open notifications by scrolling down on the home and to turn the display on or off with a double tap, or simply the possibility of setting an app drawer without having to change the entire launcher.





The road would certainly be uphill and it would take time to catch up with the competition, but Honor should in my opinion start from scratch and create its own new interface that marks the clear departure from the past. Nobody would complain if on board the Honor smartphones there was at some point a practically stock software, such as that of Nothing Phone (1) or that of Asus smartphones, on which the company could then build a new identity over the months and years. .

Having made this necessary premise, Honor 70 has no problems in daily operations and as already mentioned above, the software is well functioning. There are Google services, the main novelties of Android 12 are present and the extra features implemented by Honor are useful.

There are more pre-installed applications here than the top model, but they are also in this case, all easily eliminated with a few taps.

The real news are the cameras: here is the brand new Sony IMX800 sensor

Dove Honor 70 clearly improves compared to last year is the photographic sector. This year the company has decided to better balance the choice of components and to focus a lot on a new and unprecedented Sony sensor for the main camera, the IMX800.

Apart from the always questionable depth camera from 2MP, Honor 70 mounts a 54MP main camera with f / 1.9 aperture lenses and a 50MP ultra-wide-angle secondary camera with f / 2.2 aperture lenses and a 122 ° viewing angle, quite wider than that of some competitors in this price range.





The only shortcomings that we can underline are those of a real telephoto lens, the smartphone performs the digital zoom by cropping the image on the sensor main sensor, and of the optical stabilization (OIS) on the main sensor, a lack which is however mitigated in part by shorter exposure times even in the dark than in the past generation.



Moving on to the results, the Honor 70's cameras perform very well of day . The details are generally well preserved and, despite not being a fan of the brand's "color science", the results are appreciable. The secondary camera loses some detail at the edges of the image and does not correct the distortion caused by the wide angle much, although the latter could very well be a stylistic choice. Both tend to darken the shadow areas a little too much for a high contrast effect that you may or may not like depending on your personal taste.

When the light goes down and dusk approaches it is the wide-angle camera a feel mainly the shot, with a vignette effect perhaps a little too evident. Honor 70 defends itself very well when compared to other competitors in this price range but don't expect miracles. On the contrary, the main camera is able to return interesting, detailed and well balanced color shots even at night.

And it is at night that you notice how the dynamic range of the new Sony IMX800 is good in fact good, reinforcing the idea that the dark shadows obtained during the day are only the result of a stylistic choice in the elaboration of the image.





As written in our test of Honor Magic4 Pro, Honor has extremely interesting and capable hardware at its disposal, but it must improve in managing the information arriving from the sensors to raise the results even more. Software processing is, in some ways, a subjective science and the shots obtained may appeal to some more and less to others, however the brand's smartphones have (in my opinion) incredible unexpressed potential. They can definitely improve with updates, as long as the company decides to continue development and improve their algorithms.







Very good i portraits in the dark if your intention is posting on social networks. The foreground subject is cut out neatly and the background is pleasantly blurred. The rendering of details on the main subject decreases a bit using this mode, but for a mid-range smartphone you can't complain at all.

When using the digital zoom, especially in the dark, it can happen to notice artifacts due to processing algorithms. For example, the outline of objects that have a solid color as a background could be made clearer, almost highlighted.



If we want to compare the Honor 70 to the competition, it is able to obtain much better images than Nothing Phone (1) and even outperforms Oppo's more expensive Reno8 Pro when it comes to wide-angle camera. Pixel 6a has a more powerful chip on its side and Google's algorithms that unfortunately leave no hope for the Honor mid-range.

Honor 70, however, is a much more balanced smartphone than many other models in this category and has well balanced the two main cameras and the front camera to offer good results with all three sensors, while others maybe have a better main camera and then neglect everything else.

Speaking of front camera, Honor 70 mounts the same last year, a 32MP sensor with f / 2.2 lenses that we liked once again, although not perfect.



Basically we are in front of an excellent machine for creating content for social networks. This is Honor's goal for this product series and the result is exactly what one might expect. The top of the range are obviously far away but the goal has never been to surpass the flagships. For the price at which it is proposed it has a lot to say.

Conclusions

Honor 70 is therefore a smartphone that improves in small steps in practically every area of ​​expertise, with the greatest generational leap made in the photographic sector. Image processing could be better but, in its price range, it is perhaps one of the most balanced and well-balanced products dedicated to photography.





It doesn't have any real weaknesses that weigh on the overall quality of the product, and it doesn't even have exaggerated specifications put in just to get attention. It does what it promises and does it well.

Taking advantage of promotions or waiting for a price drop, Honor 70 is certainly a valid alternative to the direct opponents which are Pixel 6a, Nothing Phone (1) and Oppo Reno8. Ideal for novice vloggers or content creators who want to improve the quality of their social content without spending a fortune.