Brands have traditionally had as much influence over our technology choices as our fashion choices. We buy an iPhone or a Samung phone for the same reasons we buy an Armani suit or a pair of Louboutin shoes – because they look good and they are associated with quality.
But as smartphones have become more and more commoditised, the reasons to fork out hundreds of pounds for a designer handset have become fewer. These days you can get your hands on a device that looks just as good and has most of the same features as the high-end handsets, for a third of the price.
While it's tempting to view these as "cheap knock-offs", many are growing into respected brands in their own right. Honor, for example, the smartphone brand launched by Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, is making a name for itself selling affordable but feature-packed products to younger consumers, mainly through e-commerce channels.
The company's latest smartphone, the Honor 7, is a prime example. With a subtly elegant design, a spec list to rival those of its "Tier 1" competitors, and a price tag of £250, it's becoming hard to think of reasons to keep paying exorbitant prices for premium brands.
Design
The Honor 7 has a metal frame and an aluminium back cover that has been blasted with ceramic particles to give it a smooth matt finish. As well as power and volume buttons, it has a "Smart Key" that gives users access to the Honor 7's voice commands.
The camera module, which protrudes slightly from the rear of the device, is covered with Sapphire glass, which is second only to diamond in its hardness and extremely durable. Immediately below it is the fingerprint reader, which appears as a square indentation and blends with the back cover.
Honor has made efforts to ensure the device has a premium feel, with all the ports and buttons nicely rounded off. At 157g, it also has a satisfyingly weighty feel.
My only criticism would be the narrow plastic strips along the top and bottom edges, which break up the otherwise sleek design, but the colour and texture of the plastic is well matched to the aluminium, so the impact on the overall appearance is minimal.
Display and user interface
The Honor 7 has a 5.2-inch Full HD 1920x1080 display, which is clear and crisp with bright vibrant colours. The bezel is about a millimeter all the way around, and Honor claims the device has a 72.4 per cent screen-to-body-ratio, which seems to make good use of the availale space.
The phone runs Android 5.0 (Lollipop), but without Google's material design, so the user interface is flat with almost no traces of Google's latest aesthetics. The operating system is overlaid with Huawei's EMUI 3.1 skin. This takes a bit of getting used to – for example, there is no app drawer, so all the apps appear on your homescreen by default.
It is possible to hide them away in a "hidden apps" folder, which you can bring up by pinching the screen, but it's not the most intuitive, and seems like an unnecessary complication.
Huawei's default keyboard is also a bit awkward to use, due to the spacing of letters. However, you can get around this by downloading the excellent Swiftkey app, which makes typing, predictive text and autocorrect much more intuitive.
Overall, the Honor 7 offers a fairly clean Android user experience, albeit with a bit of unusual styling. EMUI 3.1 is a little more restrictive than vanilla Android when it comes to peronalisation, but most of these have a work around.
Cameras
The Honor 7 has an excellent pair of cameras – 20MP on the back with a dual-LED flash and 8MP on the front for taking selfies.
Huawei's autofocus technology means that the Honor 7's rear camera can focus in just 0.1 seconds, and EMUI 3.1 comes with a wide variety of filter effects, including de-mist, soft light, and "good food" mode for creating "food porn" pictures.
The selfie camera also comes with a beauty setting, allowing you to adjust the level of enhancement and airbrushing on your selfies. Once you've chosen your settings, the phone will remember your preferences and even create custom filters.
I was really impressed with the quality of pictures I was able to take – particularly given that camera quality is often one of the things that is sacrificed to keep the cost of handsets down. Both the photos themselves and the editing tools are on a par with those offered on most top-end devices.
Processor, storage and battery
The Honor 7 features a HiSilicon Kirin 935 chipset with a 64-bit Octa-core processor clocked at 2.2 GHz. Some testers claims this is faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 series, and during my test the phone was very quick and responsive.
The phone comes with 3GB RAM, which is more than adequate for multi-tasking, surfing the web and even some intensive gaming. It also has 16GB internal storage, expandable up to 128GB with a micro-SD card.
