Honor has been around for two years Separate from parent company Huawei, it means that – Unlike Huawei – It may sell phones with Google apps and services pre-installed, which means they’re really worth considering if you live in a country where Honor sells phones. This includes many European markets but not the US, at least not yet.

But the change has allowed recent phones from Honor like last year honor 50 And this magic4 proTo compete in the crowded Android smartphone market, the brand is yet to find its unique selling point. Its phones don’t exceed expectations in any one area, be it camera or screen quality, performance, or length of software support.

That doesn’t change with Honor’s latest international phone, the Honor 70. In the past week I’ve been using the phone, I haven’t found anything that I would consider a deal-breaker. That’s all right: Battery life is great, performance and camera quality are fairly good, and performance is solid overall. But there’s nothing here that is exceptional for me to recommend the Honor 70 over any other cheap midrange phone released this year. The Honor 70 needs a showstopping feature to stand out, and it doesn’t have one.

The Honor 70 starts at £480 (about $566 USD) for the model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Stepping up to £530 (about $625 USD) gets you 256GB of storage. I am using the latter model.

With its 6.67-inch curved OLED display and hole-punch front camera cutout, the Honor 70’s front looks similar to last year’s Honor 50. It’s always-on display with 1080p resolution, dynamic 120Hz refresh rate, and has an in-display fingerprint sensor that was so fast and reliable I barely noticed it while using it.

The problem I had is that it is curved, the edges of the display have disappeared on the left and right sides of the phone. Yes, it gives the phone a premium look similar to flagships like flagships Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra And Pixel 6 Pro And the bezels on the left and right sides of the screen appear smaller than they actually are. But that means the edges of the display have a slight shadowy tint because you always see them off-axis, and the curved edges tend to focus light reflections into bright lines at the edges of the display. I’ve been more forgiving of curved displays lastBut in the case of the Honor 70, it makes the phone’s screen less functional, reducing usable space for very little benefit.

At the back, the design of the Honor 70 is a bit more elegant than that of the Honor 50. The two distinct circular camera bumps are no longer connected by a raised section, which gives a simpler, cleaner look to the back of the phone. In the UK, the phone is available in three colours: Silver, Black and the Green version that I am used to. There’s no official IP rating for dust and water resistance, no headphone jack, and no expandable storage.

Out of the box, the Honor 70 runs Android 12, with Honor’s own Magic UI 6.1 software running on top of it. I eventually liked Magic UI, but it took a bit of work to get there – swapping out the ugly and cluttered SwiftKey software keyboard (which kept trying to capitalize all my lowercase usernames) for Gboard, uninstalling half a dozen bloatware apps ( Sorry, Trainspal, Booking.com, lords mobile, game of sultanset al.), and re-enabling the app drawer.

Once I’ve set it up to my liking, I found Magic UI to be a nice, clean Android launcher that doesn’t get in the way too much. Yes, it does have some built-in ecosystem features that I suspect many people will find use, such as Honor Share, which is designed to transfer files to other Honor devices faster. However, these are made for inclusion like a small shortcut menu that can be accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the lock screen. Just note that the swiping gesture used to access this menu is the same one used to access the homescreen if you’re using Face Unlock, which can be frustrating. I would recommend sticking to fingerprint unlock.

The Honor 70’s Snapdragon 778G Plus processor handles daily tasks with ease. Scrolling through visually appealing apps like Twitter is lovely and easy on the phone’s 120Hz display, and I didn’t notice any notable hitches when I swiped between apps. One sore spot is the phone’s haptics, which can be overly aggressive and cheap-feeling compared to the sophisticated clicks you feel with other handsets.

Speaker quality is moderate, with audio produced by the phone’s single set of downward-firing speakers. They’re loud enough that I could listen to podcasts out loud while washing up, but overall they sounded sharp and hollow, and I found it more difficult than usual in some YouTube videos to pick up dialogue with excessive background noise.

Honor says that the Honor 70 will get two years of Android updates and three years of security updates. This is a fairly typical software support period for Android handsets and coincides with what OnePlus is offering. Midrange Nord 2T, For example. But elsewhere in the Android ecosystem, Google and Samsung are pushing things a lot. The Pixel 6A will get five years of security updates and is more affordable at £399 (about $466), though oddly Google is detailing how many OS updates it will get, while Samsung has offered four years of OS updates and more. Five years of security is promised. patch for Recent £399 Galaxy A53, Even the £399 Nothing is due to the Phone 1 (eventually) Receive three years of Android updates and four years of security updates. I don’t think we’re at the point where offering only three years of security updates should be considered a deal-breaker, but we’re getting closer.

That’s a lot of complaints, so let’s talk about something that I really liked about the Honor 70 – its battery life. I took an average of 6.5 hours of screen-on time per day from the phone and put it on a continuous charge in the evening with over 50 percent charge. Over a day of heavy use, which included having the phone screen on for 90 minutes while I used it for cycling instructions Too Streaming music over Bluetooth headphones, I ended the day with a 35 percent charge.

Honor includes a 66W fast charger in the box. It supports Honor’s SuperCharge standard as well as Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0, but there’s no mention of support for Power Delivery (PD), which might explain why it wasn’t able to charge my MacBook . I found that it took the phone from empty to 52 percent in 20 minutes, to 72 percent in 30, and fully charged in less than 50 minutes. It’s not quite as fast as the less expensive £369 OnePlus Nord 2T (about $431), which can charge to 100 percent in less than half an hour, but it’ll still be more than fast enough for most people. There’s no wireless charging, which is still a relative rarity at this price point outside of devices like the £419 ($429) iPhone SE 5G or the Nothing Phone 1.

The Honor 70 packs a 32-megapixel selfie camera, and on the back, there are three rear cameras: a 54-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. This is one less than the Honor 50 as Honor now includes macrophotography capabilities in the Ultrawide. The company deserves some credit for including a high-resolution sensor for the phone’s secondary ultrawide camera when a lot of other companies downplay it. But at this price point, the Honor 70 faces stiff competition from the more affordable Pixel 6A, and it struggles to compete with Google’s low-light photography smarts.

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With good lighting, the Honor 70’s camera is on par with most modern smartphones. Images are well detailed, and Honor’s software results in well-saturated images that are colorful without looking unnatural, as we see with Samsung’s smartphone cameras. Honor specifically advertises that it has tuned its cameras to better deal with strongly backlit subjects, and sure enough, when I took a picture of myself in front of a brightly lit window, Honor’s software lit me well without ruining the rest of the shot. But the downside is that sometimes images can appear a bit flat as the phone’s software doesn’t allow shadows to be too dark. Switch to Ultrawide, and thanks to the 50-megapixel sensor, the level of detail remains widely consistent, though I find that colors in photos aren’t as accurate as those in the main camera.

For videos, the phone supports 4K filming at up to 30fps. Video quality is fine but not great, and attempting to film in 4K yields some noticeable judging. Honor also has some interesting video software features in what’s called “Solo Cut Mode”, which is capable of filming a landscape video, as well as filming a zoomed-in video in portrait that covers a given subject throughout. Tracks in frame. It’s just about work, but I didn’t find it very believable, and it often loses my track in a given scene. I struggle to think of many situations where I would use the feature, but it’s an interesting enough novelty.

I have noted Previous review of Honor phones That its software makes photos of faces brighter, and the same thing continues to happen here, even with all of its software-processing beauty modes turned off. The effect is even more pronounced in photos taken with the phone’s selfie camera, which all look like you’re using a filter.

If you’re careful, you can get some decent low-light shots from the Honor 70. By default, in its primary photography mode, its camera will demand that you hold a shot still for a few beats so that it can collect some additional lighting data. It’s fine with still shots, but other times you try to photograph a moving object like a person, it becomes difficult to hold the shot as still as the Honor 70 asks. And that means a lot of my attempts at taking handheld photos of myself in low light ended up with a blurry mess.

Most of the features of Honor 70 are quite good. Its cameras are good, its software is good, and its length of software support is good. There are also some aspects of the phone that are better than good, such as battery life, charging speed and responsiveness of its display. (Though I wish it weren’t curved.)

But with a starting price of £480, £80 more expensive than many other very capable midrange handsets released this year, “good enough” isn’t really enough to justify a purchase. of google Pixel 6a More affordable with a better camera, longer software support, and official IP ratings for dust and water resistance. Samsung’s Galaxy A53 More affordable and offers an equally long software support period and a great, flat display. iPhone SE 5G Is more affordable and provides access to the iOS app ecosystem and wireless charging. nothing call 1 Funny flashing lights.

Unless you definitely need the IP rating, I don’t think the Honor 70 has any serious flaws or deal-breakers. But neither does it have any showstopping features to justify its price premium.

Photography by John Porter / The Verge