Huawei Y7 Pro 2019 Review: Overall A Good Phone for It's Price

Huawei, now a pretty popular brand in Nepal have smartphones in every category; Budget phones, mid-range phones, and the flagship phones. Recently they have released 2 or 3 new phones and one of them is the Huawei Y7 Pro 2019.

This is a refresh to the older Y7 Pro, and one thing I’ll say right now is that this phone looks pretty premium for a budget phone. This goes for like 18 thousand rupees but it certainly looks more expensive. Well, I’ve used this for quite a while so let’s get on with the full review.

When you look at this phone for the first time, it’s very similar to the Nova series and is rather very different from the Y7 Pro 2018. It has the dewdrop notch on the front, similar glass-like finish on the back, dual rear cameras with AI and a single front camera. The size is bigger as well compared to the Y7 Pro 2018.

Build & Design

The build of this phone is really impressive, the back looks like glass but its actually plastic and the phone will look absolutely beautiful when it’s new but it will catch some smudges after using it for a long time, so you should definitely use a case with this phone.

On the front, it has the U style notch with slim borders all around the screen but the chin is slightly thick, however, it’s not an eyesore. The sim tray can accommodate two Nano-sim cars and a microSD up to 512GB which uses the sim 2 slot. The speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack and USB charging port are all at the bottom.

The volume and power buttons are at a good position and the buttons do feel clicky and rigid. And there’s no Fingerprint sensor on this phone. So it might be a turn off for some people out there.

Well, you have the face unlock and it’s pretty quick under good lighting. And it works in dark situations as well. So you really don’t have a problem with the face unlock unless it’s too dark. There’s a raise to wake option as well so it gets really easy to use face unlock and it feels very intuitive.

Display

The slick frame of the Y7 Pro 2019 also houses a 6.26 inches IPS LCD display with a screen resolution of 720* 1520. This gives the Y7 Pro 2019 a pixel density of 269 with the aspect ratio of 19:9. I have to say I enjoyed the screen, watching shows on Netflix and YouTube was pretty good. Even though it’s only an HD display, you won’t really feel that big of a difference from an FHD display. And, those reduced bezels all around certainly helps to achieve more immersive content viewing.

The LCD panel used on the Y7 Pro 2019 is a good one, it’s not exceptional but the colors and viewing angles are decent, there are no color shift issues, its bright enough and I didn’t have any issues with the display on outdoors as well.

Performance

On to the specs, it’s a budget entry-level specification. We get the Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 chipset, 3Gigs of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, which does a fine job as a budget smartphone. Opening apps and switching between multiple apps is also good enough.

There were no major lags as such, most of the time I use YouTube, Instagram, and messenger at the same time and I didn’t have any issue while doing so. Games run decently. Asphalt 9 Legends runs fine at default settings, you cannot play this game at high settings though. I played Sim City as well and the game ran decent with negligible lags. Overall the performance is good for a phone at this price range.

Camera

Now on to the camera you’ve got 13MP + 2 MP Dual camera setup on the rear. And a single 16MP camera on the front.
Rear Camera’s real-life performance is decent for a budget smartphone. Images on daylight turn out pretty good. The pictures have the right amount of detail and exposure. The dynamic range is also quite balanced with some exceptions during harsh lighting conditions.

As for the camera modes, you get standard photo mode, aperture mode, HDR, Pro mode, but there’s no dedicated portrait mode. Well, the rear camera uses AI and it does detect the scene as a portrait mode when you’re trying to capture an image of a person. The portrait mode does a good job of blurring out the background. Even though the edge detection is not perfect, the portrait images from the Y9 2019 turn out quite good and are satisfactory.

As with previous Huawei phones, I’m not a big fan of AI but this phone has to be one of the most affordable smartphones with AI enabled camera and I liked the AI almost most of the times when I was using this phone. The AI seemed to be helping especially during night time, the night images with AI were much better than the images without the AI.

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As for the videos you can capture up to 1080p 30fps videos and there is no sort of stabilization mentioned. So, yes the videos are not that great but it’s good enough for social media purposes.

Now talking about the front camera. I liked the front camera more than the rear camera. There’s no HDR Pro mode which is available on the Nova 3i but the picture with the bright background was better than what I expected. Usually, selfies with Bright background tend to get washed out but this one did a pretty decent job.

Software

I won’t talk about the EMUI because it’s the same as the other previous nova and y series phones. There’s not much change.

Huawei is often known for its continuous update on their mid-range smartphones. Well, Y7 Pro 2019 is no different. It comes with Android Oreo out of the box! However, it’s not pure stock Android experience. You get a Huawei’s EMUI on top of Android Oreo. Huawei’s EMUI is often considered to be like an iOS. To be fair, you can easily see the resemblance between the two operating systems.

Huawei’s EMUI might not be flattering when you look at it but it is one of the most efficient OS in the Android department. EMUI is fast, responsive and most of all it is very battery efficient.

Battery

Now, onto one of the better features of the Y7 Pro 2019, its huge 4000 mAh battery. The battery on the y7 2019 will last you a day easily even on heavy usage. And if you’re an average user, you could even last almost 2 days with a single charge.

Conclusion

So, at last, Y7 Pro 2019 is one of the competitive phones for this segment. Its overall look and feel are much similar to their more premium lineup, the Nova lineup rather than the Y lineup. The phone looks good, feels good and performs well. Y7 Pro 2019 is a good phone for the price that it offers.

Huawei Y7 Pro 2019 Review: Overall A Good Phone for It’s Price