Honor has been separated from parent company Huawei for nearly two years. That means that, unlike Huawei, Honor can sell phones with Google apps and services preinstalled, making them a viable option if you live in a country where Honor sells phones. This includes several European markets but not, at least not yet, the United States.
That remains true with Honor’s most recent international phone, the Honor 70. I haven’t found anything that I’d consider a deal-breaker in the past week of using the phone.
Everything works fine: the battery life is excellent, the performance and camera quality are adequate, and overall performance is strong.
But there’s also nothing here that stands out enough for me to recommend the Honor 70 over any of the other cheaper midrange phones released this year. To stand out, the Honor 70 requires a standout feature, which it lacks.
The Honor 70 starts at £566 (approximately £480) for a model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.
256GB of storage is available for £530 (approximately $625 USD). I’ve been working with the latter model.
The Honor 70’s front looks very similar to last year’s Honor 50, with its 6.67-inch curved OLED display and hole-punch front camera cutout.
It has an always-on display with a 1080p resolution and a dynamic refresh rate of 120Hz, as well as an in-display fingerprint sensor that is fast and reliable enough that I barely notice using it.
The Honor 70’s design is a little more elegant around the back than the Honor 50’s.
The two distinct circular camera bumps are no longer connected by a raised section, giving the phone’s back a simpler, cleaner appearance.
The phone is available in three colors in the UK: silver, black, and the green version I’ve been using. There is no official dust and water resistance rating, no headphone jack, and no expandable storage.
The Honor 70 comes pre-installed with Android 12 and Honor’s own Magic UI 6.1 software.
I grew to like Magic UI after ditching the ugly and cluttered SwiftKey software keyboard (which kept trying to capitalize my all-lowercase username), uninstalling half a dozen bloatware apps (sorry, TrainPal, Booking.com, Lords Mobile, Game of Sultans, and others), and reenabling the app drawer.
The Honor 70’s Snapdragon 778G Plus processor handles daily tasks with ease. On the phone’s 120Hz display, scrolling through visually dense apps like Twitter is lovely and smooth, and I didn’t notice any noticeable hiccups as I swiped between apps.
One flaw is the phone’s haptics, which can be overly aggressive and cheap-feeling when compared to the refined clicks of other handsets.
To read our blog on “Huawei Mate 50 series will be officially released without Leica lens,” click here