Sub-£250 Honor 7 Takes Aim At European Mid-Range Smartphone Market

Huawei-owned Honor believes its most powerful smartphone to date can make a serious impact on the European market following a successful Chinese launch.

The Honor 7 secured 200,000 sales within two minutes of being released last week and hopes the combination of useful hardware and nifty software features, along with a low price of £249, can win fans over here as well.

The handset was shown off at an Event in London, where the company also launched an online marketplace, Vmall.eu, where fans across Europe can buy its devices.

Seventh heaven

Powered by a Kirin 935 chipset which includes 64-bit CPU running up to 2.2GHz, 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (which is expandable up to 128GB via microSD), the Honor 7 compares favourable to most mid-range devices today, including the Ascend P8 from Huawei.

The 5.2 inch device features an aluminium unibody design, which Honor says does away with the overheating issues that plague many other smartphones on the market today.

Along with the usual power and volume control buttons, users can interact with the Honor 7 via a unique non-metallic fingerprint scanner (which Honor says is the first of its kind) on the rear, which along with unlocking the device can also be used to answer calls.

There is also an extra button, the Honor smart key, which can be programmed by the user for any specific purpose, such as mapping to open up a certain app, or taking photos quickly.

The device features a 3,100mAh battery that comes with the company’s Smart Power 3.0 battery conservation technology, and also comes with optional reverse charging function which will let you power up your friend’s devices using the power from your Honor 7.

Snappy

The company was also keen to promote the merits of the Honor 7’s camera, which includes a variety of tricks and neat features inside the 20MP rear and 8MP front cameras.

This includes a super-fast focusing time of just 0.1 seconds, a timelapse video function, which allows a long duration of video to be captured, and even a ‘good food’ mode that lets you beef up bragging photos of your lunch.

As for software, the Honor 7 runs Android 5.0 Lollipop supporting its own Emotion 3.1 UI, which lets users customise the look and set-up of their device with a range of themes and design tools.

Elsewhere, Honor has also equipped the Honor 7 with a useful voice-control function that will let you find your device if it ever gets lost. By asking ‘Where are you?’, the device will be able to answer, with the exact wording of the question able to be changed if you want that extra personal relationship with your device.

Users can also wake up their device using pre-set commands, as Honor looks to make your smartphone an inseparable companion.

The Honor 7 is available for UK customers to buy now in two colour schemes on Vmall until August 31, with further sale periods set to be confirmed later on.

What do you know about the smartphones of 2015 so far? Try our quiz!