Honor is back. After a period of absence due to the US ban that hit the old mother company Huawei, now the brand led by George Zhao returns to the West ready to regain its place on the market.
Honor 50 is the first smartphone of the brand to land in Italy equipped with Google Play Services since Huawei has decided to separate but shares with some products already seen more than what it may seem. Will it still be able to convince users?
Premium but penalized by an unoriginal design
Let's not turn around much, this Honor 50 aesthetically recalls some products of the former mother company Huawei such as P50 and nova 9. It is likely that the development and design of this device began when the two companies were still part of a single group and shared different resources. We hope that future Honor smartphones, as we have already seen with the Magic3 range, have decidedly more original lines and that claim the independence of the brand.
That said, Honor 50 is a relatively small smartphone and is much more manageable than other products currently on the market. The weight of only 175g and the low thickness of 7.8mm make a big difference, the smartphone is handled with agility.
The curved glass body embraces the rounded frames, which in turn join the curvature of the glass that protects the display. Although the frames are plastic, the smartphone in hand returns a feeling of a premium product, even if not at the levels of the devices with the finest materials which, however, sometimes cost even twice as much as this Honor. The buttons produce a dry and very pleasant “click”.
I personally like the "double porthole" design of the camera module, although the Honor 50 has the same flaw as practically any other product that places photo sensors in a corner: placed on a flat surface it wobbles, but not too annoyingly. .
The coloring we received in the test is perhaps the most boring of those available, however Honor has also brought to our market some of the sparkling finishes it had announced in recent months for the Chinese market.
Also note that the smartphone is not certified in any way against the ingress of water and dust.
Natural colors, human dimensions
Although it is really difficult nowadays to find poor quality displays, especially after a certain price range, it is difficult to put into words how much I appreciated the 6.57 ″ OLED panel mounted on Honor 50.
The lateral curvature is gradual and doesn't introduce too many annoying reflections or lead to unwanted touches on the display. The edges are very thin and the dimensions are, at least in my opinion, the perfect size to be able to use the smartphone with one hand without giving up a display large enough for viewing multimedia content.
Not only that, on this diagonal and for a product of this category the FullHD + resolution represents the right balance between a sufficiently high pixel density and the least impact on performance compared to a QHD + panel (resolution chosen to date still only for the top of the range. and not even for everyone).
From the software it is also possible to set the display update frequency to 60Hz, for greater autonomy, to the maximum value of 120Hz, for maximum fluidity, and to a dynamic setting that varies between the two as needed. Once you have experienced the pleasure of using a smartphone with such a high display refresh rate, I assure you that it is impossible to go back.
The colors of this display deserve a separate discussion. As it appears just turned on for the first time, Honor 50 shows decidedly natural, pleasant colors on the display, really close to reality, something that I really appreciated. But what I am aware of is that not everyone likes this slightly less lively look than what we are normally used to with other smartphones.
Being able to vary between a Natural and a Vivid color profile from the display settings and being able to change the temperature of the white point I thought it would be a matter of a touch to turn the colors of the OLED panel back on. I was wrong.
You see, the profile that I find natural and pleasant set by default is actually what is called Vivid in the settings, while the one that is defined by the system as Natural (which automatically applies an sRGB or P3 color profile based on the content displayed) has a very unpleasant yellow tint that is not easy to remove even by setting the white point to the coldest selection possible. Also with the Natural profile any content will be even less saturated.
As much as I love the Vivid color profile, it may not be the preferred calibration for everyone. Keep this in mind.
In the lower part of the display is hidden an average fast and fairly accurate optical fingerprint reader. Perhaps thanks to the reduced reading area of the finger, it is neither among the fastest nor among the most accurate ever tried, even if in principle it does not present any kind of problem and it is certainly not a defect.
In the upper part, however, there is a hole for the front camera with dimensions that could perhaps have been a little more contained, not that it is something that bothers me personally.
So fluid that you can't believe it
Using the smartphone you could end up being fooled by its fluidity. As I will also repeat in the section of the review dedicated to the software, Honor 50 is an incredibly fluid smartphone that at first glance could very well be mistaken for a top of the range.
The chip that moves this device, however, is not the fastest among Qualcomm's proposals, it is instead the Snapdragon 778G which is accompanied by 8GB of RAM and 256GB of fast internal memory (not expandable).
The excellent medium-high-end SoC has always handled every type of situation in the best possible way during everyday use, proving to be a very valid ally even for gaming sessions that are anything but light.
League of Legends Wild Rift reached the stable 60fps without difficulty or hiccups even in the most excited phases of the game, while in Genshin Impact (more complex title) it kept the 30fps constant with excess power margin, however not managing to withstand the 60fps setting with no noticeable dips during gameplay.
| Smartphone | Geekbench 5 | Geekbench ML | 3DMark | PCMark Work 3.0 | Speedometer 2.0 | Jetstream 2 | ||||
| Single-core | Multi-core | CPU | GPU | NNAPI | Wild Life | Wild LifeStress Test | Performance | - | - | |
| Honor 50 | 783 | 2974 | 391 | 931 | 613 | 2508 (15.00 fps) | 2514 - 2486 (98.9%) | 12349 | 61.04 (± 0.59) | 86044 |
| Motorola Edge 20 | 756 | 2702 | 382 | 955 | 795 | 2475 (14.80 fps) | 2485 - 2451 (98.6%) | 13294 | 62.56 (± 0.30) | 86363 |
| realme GT Master Edition | 784 | 2757 | 342 | 858 | 311 | 2494 (14.90 fps) | 2500 - 2379 (95.2%) | 12674 | 61.1 (± 1.3) | 67446 |
The use of this Snapdragon chip has allowed Honor to implement 5G connectivity on this terminal, missing in the Huawei nova 9 counterpart due to the US ban still in place. Also present Wi-Fi 6 and bluetooth 5.2, while the port for data transfer is only a USB 2.0 even if fortunately it is Type-C.
From the point of view of the hardware dedicated to audio there is not much to say. There is no 3.5mm headphone jack, still expensive to many, and the only speaker present is located on the underside of the device. The audio quality of the latter is not completely to be rejected, however the smartphone lacks bass and at high volumes on the highest frequencies it sometimes tends to have a metallic sound.
Good energy management
The relatively compact body of Honor 50 did not allow the company to install a battery of disproportionate size, you will have to "settle" for a 4300mAh cell.
Despite this, and despite the use of the display at the fixed frequency of 120Hz, Honor 50 has always been able to reach the moment when I went to bed with about 5 hours of screen turned on.
In the PCMark Work 3.0 Battery test that we run with SIM inserted, Wi-Fi connectivity present and display brightness set to 50%, the Honor smartphone managed to obtain a result of 10: 04h surpassing Motorola Edge 20 and its 9: 27h .
In case the battery is not enough for you to arrive in the evening or you have forgotten to charge your smartphone before starting your day, Honor includes in the package a 66W power supply capable of going from 0% to 70% in just 20 minutes. .
MagicUI needs to reinvent itself
On board Honor 50 is installed Android 11 with proprietary customization MagicUI 4.2. With this product Honor has finally returned to the charge by equipping its smartphones with Google services, for a period inaccessible to the company due to the US ban that still weighs on Huawei's shoulders today.
Each animation is perfectly fluid and gives its best with the 120Hz display. The opening and closing of the apps, the multitasking, the movement between the interface screens, every single action flows on this smartphone without a minimum of uncertainty.
Although modern smartphones pay a lot of attention to these aspects of the software and above all want to best show the prowess of their screens at high updating speed, I can assure you that Honor 50 in the trial period often seemed more pleasant to use than some flagships. which left me speechless.
I don't know if it is the presence of precise and well-designed animations or if the Honor 50 really exploits the 120Hz display better than other products, however if there is something that you cannot really complain about it is the user experience of the android terminal.
However, I have a strong criticism to make to the brand led by George Zhao: MagicUI needs to be rethought from scratch. It is an interface pleasing to the eye, full of useful functions, well organized, but it is still an almost 1 to 1 copy of Huawei's EMUI 11. The same type of numbering is still used for the software versions of the various builds that the old parent company used.
If Honor really wants to demonstrate its independence from Richard Yu's brand, it has to work hard from this point of view as well as with hardware design!
This is where the stage falls
The photographic sector of Honor 50 differs from that of Huawei nova 9 due to the presence of a 108MP sensor with f / 1.9 lens as the main camera. Generally the shots that can be obtained are discreet and will please most mainstream users.
If you are a photography enthusiast, however, you will immediately notice some small defects due to the image processing, such as the annoying edges that surround the areas with different contrast (in the examples below, look closely at the electric cables or birds of passage that contrast with the blue sky). In some shots there are overexposed or underexposed areas, in general the dynamic range is not the best.
Getting close enough to the subject you want to photograph, the large 108MP sensor will produce a large amount of natural bokeh, a blur that in some cases is really exaggerated and that could have been corrected at least slightly with higher quality lenses.
When the evening falls, or simply you are in dark areas, the lack of optical stabilization is felt. The night mode, however, helps to take definitely sharper and less noisy images if the subject is not moving.
The difference in detail is remarkable.
Night mode increases the dynamic range of images by saving shadows and not overexposing highlights.
The secondary 8MP camera has lenses with an f / 2.2 aperture and a 120 ° field of view. Unfortunately, even in ideal conditions this sensor lacks quality, returning very blurry and honestly not very pleasant shots. The last two 2MP sensors for macro and depth, as I have always repeated, could very well have been saved and the budget allocated to them could be used for a better secondary camera.
The 32MP f / 2.2 front camera, on the other hand, performed fairly well in our tests. Good dynamic range, natural colors, not overly elaborate results, in general very valid for selfie lovers even if not perfect.
Honor targets the world of vloggers for this product and has provided the smartphone with a multi-video function that I personally find very original. It is possible to record in split screen at the same time with the front and main, main and wide-angle cameras, or in full screen with the main one with a small mobile pop-up from the front. It is even possible to vary these settings while recording, very convenient!
Unfortunately video recording stops at 1080p and 30fps with the front camera, a bit of a shame for those who want to use the Honor 50 extensively for recording content for their videos or social networks. The main camera reaches 4K at 30fps but it is recommended for quality and stabilization to record in 1080p at 60fps / 30fps.
Conclusions
Honor 50 is a great smartphone, it doesn't rain on this one. The fluidity of operations, the beautiful display and the good autonomy supported by a fast recharge make it a device that in everyday life is pleasant to have with you. The relatively compact body and great handling make it easy to use with one hand.
However, the link with Huawei is still too visible both in terms of design and as regards the software, confirming that many of the resources of the two companies are perhaps still shared. Surely this is something to keep in mind, if your expectation is to have the product of a completely revamped Honor in your hands this is still not the right product for you.
The unknown is the future, with Honor that will have to prove that it can stand on its own feet even without the help, staff, plants and research centers of the former owner of the brand.
Without these due considerations, apart from the slightly subdued photographic sector (a shame since the company advertises its product aimed at influencers, vloggers and the like), Honor 50 is a capable, fluid and pleasant smartphone that in our test has shown to do not fear even the most demanding activities.
The launch price of € 529.00 is perhaps a little too over the top compared to the increasingly fierce competition, but waiting for the right promotions or the natural depreciation that all smartphones go through could turn out to be a very interesting product!