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Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 unboxing and First Thoughts

by Henry O

March 8, 2019 5

Intro

Huawei just introduced a new entry to their line of smartphones in Nigeria. And it’s the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019. An entry level to mid-range device that comes with a Dewdrop display.

Now this is the first smartphone in Nigeria to come with a dewdrop display. So Huawei has beaten other smartphone manufacturers in this market to the punch.

Unboxing

First let’s see what we get in the box. On the top we have the Y7 Prime 2019, setting this aside, we have a transparent silicon case, a protective film cover, a SIM ejector tool, some paperwork and you’ve also got a Micro USB to USB cable, a pair of earphones and a 5V 2A charging brick.

That’s all we get in the box. Now let’s take a look at the Device itself. I have the Coral Red version of the Huawei Y7 2019 and boy oh boy does it look stunning.

I must say, Huawei has really improved their art of designing great looking smartphones no matter the grade or cost.

This red version looks premium and doesn’t feel like a N59, 900.00 smartphone. It feels more like it should have been in the N70k range. The back is super shiny and reflective and it just looks beautiful.

Screen

I’d like to talk about the display on the Y7 Prime first since this is what you’d spend all your time looking at and also interacting with.

The Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 with Its Dewdrop display incorporates a pearl-shaped notch, which houses the front camera, into that 6.26-inch HD+ IPS LCD screen offering an outstanding screen-to-body ratio of 80.28% in a symmetrical design that looks and feels premium.

It’s a 720p screen and the display density is at 269 PPI, so videos should look good but will be capped at the 720p resolution. The screen colors look okay but you won’t fail to notice that they aren’t exceptionally sharp. But they look very decent. It’s not the brightest screen out there but you should get up to 450nits of brightness.

Texts are clear and legible and videos on this display even though capped at a resolution of 720p, look very clean and crisp.

I noticed as well that the screen gets washed out at extreme angles. If you asked me for ratings, I’d rate this screen a 5.5 out of 10.

Battery

The Huawei Y7 Prime runs on Android Oreo 8.1 and powering the Power efficient Snapdragon 450 Processor and that huge display is a large 4000mAh battery, providing more than one-day worth of usage even for the most intensive users. I personally tested this, using the device all through the day and it just seemed like I couldn’t kill that battery no matter what I threw at it.

I’m a heavy YouTube user and I also do a lot of browsing and regular social media usage and I was able to get a total screen on time of about 7 hours on this device with about 35% battery life still left on the device.

You’d be very happy with the battery on this device. Paired with the 720p screen, you have a killer combination.

Based on my usage, I’d score the battery life on the Y7 Prime 2019, an 8 out of 10

Cameras

The Y7 Prime comes with three cameras in total, two behind and one in front. The rear cameras consist of a 13MP + 2MP depth sensing camera with AI inbuilt. You have HDR available here and you can also shoot videos as high as 1080p @ 30FPS.

The rear cameras take decent shots as you can see scrolling on the screen. Colors are great and the AI feature worked quite well recognizing sceneries and properly applying the right modes to the pictures.

Note however that I said the colors are great. The Pictures however are not quite sharp and detailed as I’d like and you would need very steady hands to achieve really good shots like the ones on your screen now.

The HDR feature worked quite well taking well balanced photos. I was mostly impressed with the photos taken.

Flip to the 16MP selfie Camera and this is where this phone’s camera shines. Photo quality looks real good and most of the features lot of users out there adore, like the AR stickers worked great. Selfies were very decent and I was very impressed with the results.

There’s also a pro mode if you’d like to play around with your own settings before taking a photo.

Overall I’d give the cameras on the Y7 Prime 2019 a 6.5 out of 10.

Specifications and Features

The Y7 Prime packs a 32GB storage paired with 3Gigs of RAM, this storage is expandable to 512GB of storage using an external SD Card. You have an Adreno 506 GPU and a Snapdragon 450 processor under the hood. These should be enough to play almost any full 3d game albeit in low graphic settings.

The device also support 4G connectivity on the following LTE Bands: 850 MHz, 900, 1800, 2100, B39, B40, B41, B38. You also have a bevy of Sensors, 20 in total including a Gyroscope, Proximity, Light, Accelerometer, Compass and a rear mounted Fingerprint sensor/scanner which works really well. It’s not extremely fast but will unlock your device in a second or less.

The Device comes with an earphone jack which I’m a huge fan of and a microphone hole on the top of the device, power and volume rockers are on the right, the SIM tray which houses a hybrid two SIM or One SIM and a memory card slot is on the left of the device. Speaker grilles and a micro USB port is at the bottom.

Software

The Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with Huawei’s EMUI 8.2 skin over android. The software on this phone is well optimized, running smoothly without any issues so far. And I’ve been using this device for about two weeks now. It’s the same EMUI skin we know from Huawei so there really is nothing new here.

As for if this device will be upgraded to Android Pie, I’m not sure. I have not heard anything from Huawei on this.

Performance is Okay. Just don’t expect to get super-fast flagship level performance. I believe the customer who this device is targeted to will be very fine with its performance.

So I’ll score the software here a 7.9 out of 10

Conclusion

I can understand who Huawei made this device for and I can understand why they made this device. This is for the budget minded individual who wants a breath of fresh Air in the entry-level to mid-range smartphones cadre.

You can call the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 a breath of fresh air in the entry to mid-range smartphone market it’s vying to play in. We’ve had two brands dominate this section in this region for very long and a lot of people would find the Y7 Prime 2019 a refreshing entry to this market.

The Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 will cost you N59,500.00 for a unit when it is eventually available in Mid March and you can pre-order the device here: http://www.jumia.com.ng/huawei-y7-prime

This would put it in a similar space with the likes of the The Nokia X5, the Infinix Hot S3X and the Tecno Camon 11 in terms of specs, price and overall performance.

Overall I’m very impressed with the build quality of this device and just how Huawei puts a lot of love into building its smartphones.

As someone once said “Good smartphones are getting cheaper and cheap smartphones are getting better”. This statement holds true for the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 and I can’t wait to hear from you what you think about this device in the comment section of this article.

Cheers