Skip to main content

Everything you need to know about the budget Honor 7X

Limited-edition red Honor 7X available in U.S. just in time for Valentine's Day

honor 7x review back full
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
Honor is making a name for itself as the brand to turn to when you want a bang-up smartphone without having to spend a fortune to get one. The Honor 7X is the follow-up to the Honor 6X, which launched last year, and it packs in the must-have features we love to see in smartphones these days — a dual-lens camera, a full-display screen, a metal body, and a fantastic design. After its October 2017 reveal in China, the Honor 7X has been available in the U.S. since December. Then, at CES in January, Honor announced that a gorgeous red version of the 7X will also make its way to the U.S. — and now it’s here.

You can read our Honor 7X review to learn more about the phone, and we’ve also included it in our best cheap phones guide

Recommended Videos

Get the Honor 7X in red

Image used with permission by copyright holder

At Honor’s CES 2018 press conference, it unveiled a red version of the Honor 7X. It’s available as of February 5 for the same $200 price tag in the U.S. and other markets. We’ve got our hands on this version, and it looks absolutely beautiful. Take a gander:

The red color option is a Valentine’s Day limited edition, which means 20,000 devices are available on the Honor website. The first 100 buyers (in any region) will also get a Honor-branded pair of Monster AM15 headphones as a special gift.

Honor also created a special Valentine’s Day giveaway where couples can enter to win two limited-edition Honor 7X phones by reenacting the first time they met in person on Instagram. If you’re single, Honor hasn’t forgotten about you either. You can also create a video of something you love and share it on Instagram for a chance to win the limited-edition Honor 7X devices.

Release and availability

How much does the Honor 7X cost? An eye-widening $200 in the U.S., and 270 British pounds in the U.K. The U.S. model packs 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, but the international model has 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage space.

The Honor 7X is available now. The phone only supports the GSM network, so it will only work on T-Mobile and AT&T, not Verizon and Sprint.

Tough design

The Honor 7X is the spiritual successor to last year’s Honor 6X, and it looks every bit the part. It has an all-aluminum unibody that’s curved on all four sides, with exceptionally narrow edges to the right and left of the screen. It’s surprisingly tough, with specially designed corner structures that provide a high degree of shock absorption, almost acting like tiny airbags.

Honor took 15 months to get the look and feel of the Honor 7X just right, and went through 28 different prototypes during that time. The effort has paid off. Not only is the phone light and comfortable to hold, but in the striking blue and red colors, it looks very special too.

Features and specification

The Honor 7X’s high-end housing packs a curved 5.9-inch edge-to-edge screen with a 2160 x 1080 pixel resolution and an 18:9 aspect ratio. The screen fits inside a body that’s no bigger than phones with a 5.5-inch screen, due to the change over to an 18:9 aspect ratio display. This means the design takes on the almost borderless look of phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the LG V30. Inside is Huawei’s eight-core Kirin 659 system-on-chip, Mali-T830 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage space on the U.K. model. A MicroSD card slot lets you add up to 256GB.

honor 7x review home screen
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

The Honor 7X doesn’t disappoint when it comes to photography. It has a dual rear camera — a 16-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel secondary sensor — that can capture Portrait Mode-like bokeh shots with in-focus foregrounds and blurred backgrounds. Honor has improved the algorithms for portrait shots, making the phone focus faster, and added new software to make the camera perform better in low light.

The selfie camera has 8 megapixels and a portrait mode, plus a selection of built-in face filters — complete with animation and sound — much like those seen on apps like Snapchat, Snow, and Line’s B612. On the software side of things, the Honor 7X ships with Honor’s custom-designed user interface EMUI 5.1, which is placed over Android 7.1 Nougat. There are some special new features, including a gesture-controlled shutter release for the selfie camera, daytime and nightime screen modes, and a single button split-screen mode, to make the most out of the large screen.

Finally, Honor has included a 3.5mm headphone port on the phone, with its own Histen Audio settings, providing a 3D surround sound effect when headphones are used. It’s exactly what you need for watching movies on the phone.

Updated February 5: Added more information about the red Honor 7X, its release. 

Steven Winkelman
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven writes about technology, social practice, and books. At Digital Trends, he focuses primarily on mobile and wearables…
These are the best Android 15 features you need to know about
Android 15 logo on a Google Pixel 8.

Android 15 has entered its latter leg of testing among developers, and in the coming months, a beta build will finally be released for the masses. So far, across the two Developer Preview builds that Google has released, we’ve encountered a handful of new features that will make life easier for smartphone users in meaningful ways.

Among them is a notification cooldown system that shields you from a barrage of audio alerts from your apps. Google has already detailed the changelog to a healthy extent, but not all new tricks have been implemented yet. But there’s still enough to unpack in Android 15, and some of those notable additions are detailed below:
Partial screen sharing

Read more
When is my phone getting Android 14? Here’s everything we know
Android 14 logo on the Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Android 14 is out now, and as usual, the first to get it was Google's own Pixel phone family. Not to be undone, Samsung pushed out its version of Android 14 — One UI 6 — after a relatively short beta period and has seemingly now completed its Android 14 rollout. Nothing, the new phone company on the block, has done the same. Now, we're just waiting for more news from Motorola, who has become the stick in the mud holding everyone up.

If you're rocking an Android phone that is still stuck on an old build, here's everything we know about official Android 14 rollout plans for all major brands available in the U.S. market. We recommend using your device's Find on page function to pinpoint your device on this list.

Read more
What is an eSIM? Here’s everything you need to know
eSIM page on the iPhone 14.

If you've purchased a new cell phone in the past decade or so, you're probably already familiar with the SIM—the little thumbnail-sized card that's used to connect to your your carrier's cellular network —but in recent years smartphone manufacturers and carriers have started replacing them with something called an eSIM.
The "e" in eSIM stands for "embedded," which makes sense as this is a SIM card that stays inside your phone and can't be removed. It performs the same function as a traditional SIM card but has the potential to make things a lot simpler for most smartphone users. Almost any new phone you buy nowadays features eSIM technology, including the new iPhone 15. In fact, the iPhone 15 doesn't even have a physical SIM card slot available, and all iPhone 15 users need to transfer to eSIM -- giving a hint at where the technology is going. Pretty soon eSIMs could become the standard, with physical SIM cards gradually fading out of use.

But if you're confused by the concept of an eSIM, don't worry -- we've got you covered. Read on as we get more specific about what eSIM technology truly is, and how it differs from its predecessor, the physical SIM card. 

Read more