Huawei Ascend P7 review

The Ascend P7’s graphics performance lagged behind the Moto X too, but the P7’s score of 7,730 (roughly 32fps) in 3DMark’s Ice Storm test means the P7 is still more than capable of handling most apps and games in the Google Play store. You may experience low frame rates in very demanding games, though, as the Ascend P7 only produced a score of 5,095 (approximately 25fps) in the 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme benchmark, but we were pleased to see a smooth 53.8fps in the Epic Citadel benchmark on High Quality.

The P7 runs Huawei’s heavily customised version of Android 4.4.2 well. Like all Huawei phones, the Ascend P7 uses the Emotion user interface, but it has the latest version so it looks particularly slick. There’s still no app tray, so all your apps have to fit on the nine available home screens, but the whole interface looks much cleaner than previous versions and app and widgets no longer look blocky and old-fashioned. You can also opt for the “Simple” home screen style instead, which uses large, simple icons.

The P7’s additional apps and software also help it stand out from the crowd. Chief among them are its handful of Smart Assistance apps that are intended to make the phone easier to use. These include a glove mode and motion control options. Enabling the latter lets you flip the phone over to mute it, shake it to rearrange apps and answer or make calls simply by raising the phone to your ear. Picking it up will also reduce the ring volume and tilting the phone will move icons and widgets. Apart from the temperamental tilt control, all of the motions worked first time when we tried them, and they’re a fun and useful addition to its set of preinstalled apps.

The P7 further distances itself from other mid-range phones with its cameras. Huawei has clearly been paying great attention to the rising trend of selfies, as there’s a high resolution 8-megapixel camera on the front of the phone in addition to a 13-megapixel camera on the back. The front-facing camera was surprisingly decent, although it often overexposed areas of bright light both in and out of doors which caused colours to look washed out as a result. In dimmer lighting conditions the colours looked much more accurate.

We also liked that when you take a selfie with the timer activated you’re prompted to look at a small window in the top right-hand corner of the screen. This is to make sure you’re looking directly at the camera. You can also set the camera to take photos automatically, either when you smile or when your voice reaches a pre-set decibel level, so that you don’t have to tap the screen manually.

There’s plenty of camera modes to try out, too, including Normal, Smart, Beauty, HDR, Panorama (or the ‘Groufie’ mode, as Huawei calls it when you’re using the front camera), Filters, Audio Note (which lets you record a 10-second audio tag after taking a picture) and Watermark (which gives you a set of stamps to add to your photos).

The ‘Groufie’ or Panorama mode is the most notable, as it lets you take wider selfie shots without everyone having to squeeze into frame. It works by asking you to take an initial portrait shot in the centre of your party and then twist your wrist to take a second and third shot either side of you. It then stitches them all together into a single widescreen image, and for the most part our attempts were fairly successful. The camera had a bit of trouble lining up complex patterns and text in the centre of the image, but it worked fine with simpler compositions.