Sometimes, it’s ok to just be ok. Throughout using the Honor X7c, I had to keep reminding myself of these words.
While the Honor X7c does have some shining features, it felt mostly ok—and that’s ok.
Solid Design
Opening and seeing the Honor X7c for the first time was the most exciting part of using the phone. We had the Forest Green colourway in for review, which I absolutely love. A neat plaid pattern on the back makes me wish other brands would be more creative with their designs.
The phone also comes in a zero-design, midnight black colour and a stunning marble, moonlight white, which we unfortunately won’t get in the South African market.
The camera stack at the back has four “lenses”. Two are cameras, one is the flash, and the fourth is just a decoy. Perhaps they did it this way for design aesthetics, but I would’ve been perfectly happy without the fake lens on the back.
For a phone with a full plastic enclosure, the Honor X7c feels good and solid in hand. The 6.77-inch screen does feel a little tall, though, so I can’t easily access the top of the screen with my regular-sized thumbs when using it with one hand.
Overall, the phone looks sharp, feels solid and has an aesthetically pleasing design, barring the one fake camera lens.
Fast and Hardy
A few neat features have been added to the X7c that give it a bit of survivability for those of us who are prone to accidents. A 5-star SGS Drop&Crush rating means the phone can handle a few drops here and there. Of course, dropping the phone is still not intended, as Honor asks you to “Please be careful to avoid drops and collisions” in the fine print. An IP64 rating makes the phone splash-proof, water resistant and dust-proof. Again, the fine print states for “everyday use.” This doesn’t mean that the IP64 rating is useless, but it does mean you should still be careful. Splashes around the pool on a hot summery day, and perhaps even a quick dip for a few seconds, should be more than survivable. While most premium phones have good features ensuring solid builds for everyday life, it’s nice to see it on an entry-level phone, too.
The 6.77-inch display has also been upgraded to 120Hz. Gamers might read this and get a little excited, but we’ll touch on that later in the article. For general use, the 120Hz display ensures a smooth and silky experience when flicking through screens or scrolling through content.
The screen also has some decent brightness options, from 850 nits at its peak to 2 nits at its lowest. The display pops in full sunlight and is perfectly visible in the middle of the night without being blinding.
Storage, RAM and Going Ham
For an entry-level device, the Honor X7c does, at least, pack some decent storage. Some retailers offer the 128 GB version, but most will sell you a device with 256 GB of storage. With the multiple cloud storage options that many of us use these days, the 256 GB of space is plenty.
The device has 8 GB of RAM, but Honor boasts an extra 8GB thanks to its Honor RAM Turbo Technology. This compresses open apps to a smaller size, keeping them in a saved rest state, thus freeing up RAM for more apps to run. It’s handy for multitasking, but RAM-intensive apps that need a lot of RAM while running don’t benefit from this feature.
This brings us to gaming. The Honor X7c does well for basic games like Candy Crush or Chess, but more powerful games like Call of Duty Mobile, Genshin Impact or PUBGM feel the sting. Even at the lowest graphics settings, these games feel jittery. Playable, sure, but not as good as they could be.
3DMark’s Wild Life Benchmark scores the Honor X7c a 663 with an average FPS of 3.98, while Wild Life Extreme gives it a 140, with an average FPS of 0.84. Clearly not a phone built for high-end gaming, which can probably be attributed to the older Snapdragon 685 CPU.
Getting Social
The Honor X7c and its “four” lens camera system includes an ok 108MP main camera lens and a 2MP Macro lens, which allows for 3x lossless zoom. The selfie camera is an 8MP pin-hole camera. What really makes a difference, though, is how the software processes the images the phone takes.
When using the camera app, pictures and videos seem grainy. However, the actual footage is not. It’s weird to wrap your head around that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get, especially when it comes to a camera.
The pictures are decent enough quality, but you lose a lot of colour saturation in low-light conditions. The AI-image enhancement also makes images feel over-softened.
A nice social feature that the Honor X7c does pack is the 300% “speaker” mode. Essentially, turning the phone into a portable speaker. While I wouldn’t say it replaces any portable speaker you already have, it does push out some decent volume and is more bassy and less tinny than the standard mode. It’s great for small parties and a cool little feature.
So, Just OK?
Yes. At the end of it all, the Honor X7c is a phone that does general phone things and nothing more. It’s great if you’re looking for a well-priced device to keep you doom scrolling or answering calls, but the rest of the features are, as I keep saying, just ok.
