Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 is the newcomer to the Chinese smartphone maker’s budget Y series. It succeeds the much famed Y7 Prime 2018, which was a much-hyped device of 2018.
The latest version was launched with a price tag of PKR 29,000 in Pakistan, and though the company Huawei has mastered the art of bringing value for money phones, will this new device be impactful enough to make its name in the Pakistani market? Will it leave a mark on the market, or will it just go unnoticed?
Well, that depends upon how good it performs, so dive into the detailed review of the device to get a good idea of what it’s capable of.
Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 specs
- Display: 6.26 inches, IPS LCD
- OS: Android 8.1 (Oreo), EMUI 8.2
- Chipset: Snapdragon 450
- RAM/ROM: 3GB/32GB
- Camera (rear): 13MP + 2MP
- Camera (front): 16MP
- Battery: 4000 mAh
Design and Display
Huawei has pulled pretty neat tricks in accumulating the traits of mid-range phones in a budget device, and Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 is no exception. From the design point of view, the smartphone is just amazing. Though Vivo Y91 comes at almost the same price, Y7 prime is leagues ahead of it in terms of design.
The dimensions of the phone are 158.9 x 76.9 x 8.1 mm, and it weighs around 168 g, which may be a bit heavy for someone with smaller hands, but the sleek design of the phone equally assists in better handling even with one hand.
On the back, the device sports a gradient color which goes from emerald green to blue and looks fantastic. Huawei is known to experiment with colors. Be it mid-range devices like the Huawei Nova 3i or flagships like the Huawei Mate 20 pro; every phone poses a new and flashy look.
A vertically placed dual-camera setup sits in the top left corner on the back like most of the devices, while on the bottom left, the branding is slapped. A fingerprint sensor rests in the middle. On the right-hand side, there are usual buttons, including the power key and volume rocker. Both the buttons are placed in just the right spot where your thumb can naturally find the keys.
The left side of the phone hosts nothing but a SIM card slot. It’s a hybrid dual SIM, which means either you can use two SIM cards or a single SIM along with a memory card.
Coming to the bottom of the device, you’ll see a micro USB charging port and a speaker grill. Don’t be fooled by two grills at the bottom. Only one of them acts as a speaker while the other one is used as a microphone. On the top side, there’s a headphone jack along with a noise cancellation mic.
Though the phone has a plastic body and a plastic frame as well, the beauty of the phone is dazzling. Unless you hold the phone to feel it, you can’t know for sure whether it is made of glass or plastic.
Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 carries a 6.26-inch IPS LCD panel. The large dew-drop display presents a 720 x 1520 pixels resolution in a modern 19:9 ratio aspect ratio and approximately 269 PPI density, all of which boils down to 80.0% screen to body ratio.
Though the large screen is ideal for media consumption, it inclines to the cooler side. The colors on the screen tend to display a subtle bluish hue, which is a common trait of almost all the Huawei phones as we experienced the same in its predecessor Huawei Y7 Prime 2018, and many other Huawei and Honor phones like the Honor 7C or Huawei Y5 Prime 2018.
Other than that, the display is quite sharp in indoor conditions, and color production is precise. Neither does it oversaturate the colors, nor does it appear dull and washed out.
However, all good cannot be said about the display experience. The viewing quality in outdoor conditions is not at par with other mid-rangers, if not poor. Such quality hinders the clear view in sunny situations, and it is tough to browse through the phone, let alone watch videos outside.
Though Honor 9 Lite comes at almost the same price as the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019, it has a far better display quality. Even the Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro has a better display quality than the Y7 prime, so the price tag could never be the excuse for such disadvantaged display quality.
OS
The phone comes with Huawei’s custom skin EMUI 8.2, which is built on Android Oreo 8.1. Granted that the custom skin feels pretty heavy for the device’s resources, it presents some exciting options that cannot be just overlooked.
From the option to display app drawer on the home screen to the color adjustment in settings, Huawei is continually changing its EMUI for the better. Only if it didn’t come with such heavy customization, it would be a lot easier for the phone to process animations.
Though almost all the Chinese phones like Oppo and Vivo etc. don’t come with an app drawer, we like the EMUI better among them all because of its simplicity and easy-to-navigate system settings.
There is also a simple mode that can be accessed by going to Settings>System. It makes the icons, and the font bigger and also enables a click sound every time you touch on the screen. This mode is beneficial for visually impaired people.
Other than that, since the phone comes with Oreo, managing and snoozing notifications is a lot easier. All you have to do is long-press a notification to take action of your choice among the options. There are also several ways you can navigate through the phone. You can enable dock navigation or gesture navigation by going to Settings>System>System Navigation.
Performance and Battery
Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 sports an entry-level Snapdragon 450 processor paired with 3GB RAM along with 32GB internal storage. Earlier, we reviewed the Oppo A7 that came with the same chipset, but 4GB RAM, and astonishingly, the Y7 prime provided the same level of performance in our tests as the Oppo A7, although it packs less RAM.
Regarding the benchmark performance, the device performs pretty averagely as expected, but as earlier mentioned, it rivals the Oppo A7 though it packs less RAM. Here are the benchmark scores.
The phone can appropriately be termed as “swift” or “snappy.” It performs well with day-to-day tasks. In our real-life usage tests, we did not experience any hiccups or lags while browsing the device and using social media apps as well as calling and texting, all of which compile in a package of moderate usage.
As a fact, note that moderate usage is never a problem for almost all the midrange phones. It is the heavy and intensive usage that demands more of the phone, and resultantly, the phones with lower specs exhibit poor performance.
However, in the case of Huawei Y7 Prime 2019, although it packs a lower-end processor, it performs immaculately in moderate usage. As for heavy usage, we did experience a significant stutter when switching between resource-intensive apps. Such behavior was expected, but even then, the phone performed better than our expectations.
It came as a shock that the handset played heavy games like the Deer Hunter and the Real Racing smoothly even though a ton of apps were running in the background. However, not everything was buttery smooth. We did notice some frame drops in gaming, but keeping in mind the price tag and specs of the phone, it still proved a good performer.
As for the battery, the phone packs a 4000 mAh battery and has one of the best battery optimizations we have seen. It came out third on our 3 hours battery drain test just behind the Vivo Y91 and Vivo Y95.
In moderate usage, the phone ate up 12% battery in 1 hour, while in heavy usage, it just consumed 15% of the battery, which hints towards the fantastic battery optimization of the device.
Camera
For the optics, Huawei Y7 prime 2019, comes with a dual-camera setup on its back, that encloses a 13 MP lens with f/1.8 along with a 2MP depth sensor that helps in giving your pictures a blurred background.
There are a lot of modes you can utilize according to your picturing requirements. To our surprise, the camera lacked the portrait mode, but it automatically recognizes a face in the frame and adjusts its settings to portrait as the camera is laced with AI.
As for the camera performance, the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 does not come short. To expect something like a flagship experience or even a high mid-range performance would be unjust, keeping in mind the price tag of the phone. However, the camera is pretty good and captures enough details.
Color reproduction is pretty natural in Auto mode, and the HDR mode works like a charm in brightening the darker corners of pictures. However, if you turn the AI toggle on, it is supposed to enhance the colors, but on the downside, the AI over-saturates the colors which look pretty unnatural.
With well-lit subjects, the camera performs great. However, in low light, noise starts to creep into the picture, but then again, a phone with such a minimal price is not meant to excel at low light photography.
The wide aperture mode is astonishingly better than the more expensive Huawei phones. The camera recognizes the subject outlining pretty well and blurs out the background smoothly without affecting the subject.
On the front, it packs a 16MP selfie camera, and as high as the megapixel count may seem, the camera is quite disappointing. The overprocessing and oversharpening are visible in the selfies. Moreover, what’s the point of such a high megapixel count if you are not provided with basic features like the portrait mode.
All in all, Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 has a great camera that beats many other midranges available in the market right now, so we think it’s a go when it comes to the camera.
Verdict
The most crucial factor for the handsets available in this price range is the value for money, and Huawei Y7 Prime 2019 excels in that. It presents some irresistible offerings at a very competitive price. The design and build quality of the phone is impressive, except that it could lack usability because of being slightly larger than most phones, but that is negligible.
As for the performance, even with an entry-level chip, the phone does a great job of maintaining an optimum balance between price and performance. The software experience in Huawei phones used to be sluggish before, but now the EMUI is becoming more refined with every update.
For the camera part, the phone is on par with other handsets in the mid-range segment like the Oppo A7 and the Vivo Y91, and Samsung Galaxy J6 Plus, all of which are priced higher than the Y7 Prime 2019.
The battery, however, is the most amazing one we have seen on any phone till now and is a performer. All of this boils down to one question. Should you buy it? Though there are many other options in this price segment, you should go for this phone, keeping in mind that you can pardon the unjust front camera performance.
Nice. Under this price this looks great. Specs are nice, battery is great and performance is good.
nice review. thanks a lot
I read your reviews on Samsung A10 and Oppo A5S. In your opinion, which is the better phone. I am not a heavy game user. I mostly do surfing, texting, phone calls and YouTube.
Can you please help me in making a good decision? Thank you in advance. I hope to hear from you soon.
Well, your comment could have been more relevant under A10 or A5s reviews but since you asked, A5s is a little better in performance with reference to what you tell. But both the phones belong to the budget category and they are not made for heavy usage and usage pattern vary person to person.