Huawei Y7: Full, in-depth review

As with any budget phone, the Huawei’s 2017 refresh of the Y7 is best looked at in context. After all, the lower the asking-price, the more valuable even the basic box-ticking features become. More specifically, it’s best compared to the slightly-cheaper Y5.

With a better display, bigger battery and crisper camera, the Y7 promises to give a little extra bang for your buck to those who like what Huawei is selling with the Y5 but want to cut down on the compromises.

The Pitch

The gist here is that for a price-point only $100 greater than that attached to the Y5, you get a suite of pretty marked improvements across the board. If the sell for the Y5 was a box-ticking smartphone experience for a sub-$200 pricepoint, the sell for the Y7 is one that begins to erode and blur the often-stark divide between budget and mid-tier devices.

It literally turns the Y5’s weaknesses into strengths, smoothing out its cut corners and leaving customers with a product that more than just ticks all the boxes and doesn’t break the bank.

Specs

The Y7 boasts an IPS LCD display (720 x 1280 pixels) and runs on a Qualcomm MSM8940 Snapdragon 435 chipset paired with 2GBs of RAM. Like the Y5, it boasts 16GB of on-board storage but is able to be expanded via MicroSD.

Again like its cheaper sibling, the Y7 features a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top-most edge but otherwise boasts the same metal and glass aesthetics you’ll find in most of Huawei’s range. It runs on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) coated in Huawei’s own EMUI 5.1.

However, unlike the Y5, the Y7 has a more-sizable 4000mAh non-removable lithium-ion battery, charged via MicroUSB and supporting Dual-SIM configurations. It lacks in QuickCharge but boasts a Huawei-developed power-saving solution intended to bridge that gap.

Finally, when it comes to the cameras, the Y7 features a 12-megapixel shooter (f/2.2) with phase detection autofocus and LED-flash on the back matched by a 8-megapixel camera (f/2.0) on the front.