Today I want to dive into the Honor X7d because everyone on social media is talking about its insane durability and battery life. Since this is a budget phone, I was really curious to see if it actually lives up to the hype or if it’s just marketing talk.
Design
You can get the Honor X7d in three colors: Velvet Black, Meteor Silver, and Desert Gold. It has a thickness of 8.2mm and weighs 208g.
When you hold the X7d, the first thing you’ll notice is the flat plastic back cover. If you tap it with your nail, that plasticky vibe definitely gets stronger. But don’t worry about its durability. Sure, Honor made the back cover out of polycarbonate, but they added a layer of PMMA on top. This basically acts like a protective body fence for the back cover.
I actually like the design of the camera island. It looks like it was borrowed from higher end phones. The bump isn’t huge, so it won’t bother you in daily use. The back cover and frame are flat, which is a design we are seeing a lot these days. It’s pretty much the current market trend.
On the left side of the plastic frame, there is a button Honor calls the AI button. By pressing it, you can quickly access a bunch of the phone’s key features. You can even assign your favorite app to it for super fast access. On the right side, you’ll find the power button, which doubles as a fingerprint scanner, along with the volume rocker. The power button is placed well, but the volume buttons are a bit high up because of the phone’s size, making them a little hard to reach. At the bottom, we have the speaker, Type-C port, SIM tray, and a mic. Up top, there’s another mic and an IR blaster.
Up front, Honor went with flat protective glass housing the selfie camera at the top. When reading the specs, you might notice there is no fancy branded glass here, which could make you worry. But let me tell you, there’s absolutely no need to stress. Just like the rest of the X series, Honor went all out on durability here. Thanks to advanced engineering based on 360 degree impact energy distribution and the use of tempered glass, the X7d can easily survive a 2 meter drop.
The capacitive fingerprint sensor built into the power button worked great in my daily use, and I didn’t face any issues with it at all.
On top of all that, the X7d has an IP65 rating. This means it’s totally dustproof, though it can’t survive deep water submersion for long. Honor claims they left this phone in the rain for 24 hours, put it 50cm underwater for 2 minutes, and washed it under running water for 5 minutes, and it survived perfectly fine. So yeah, you can absolutely take this into the shower and jam out to some music without worrying about it.
Guys, the engineering behind Honor’s X series is all about high durability and toughness. Keep in mind, this high durability isn’t just about the materials. It’s about smart engineering that spreads the impact energy across the whole body. As a budget phone, the X7d is incredibly reliable when it comes to build quality.
Display & Audio
Honor used a 6.77 inch panel for the X7d. Being a budget device, it’s got its trade-offs. The downside is that it’s a TFT LCD and doesn’t have a very high resolution. The plus side is that it gets bright enough to give you decent readability under sunlight, and on top of that, it has a 120Hz refresh rate.
During my review, I realized Honor didn’t use a high end panel here. However, it’s not the kind of screen that will annoy you during daily tasks. If I had to describe the X7d’s display in a few words, I’d say it gets the job done. That covers the screen, now let’s move on to the speakers.
The X7d features stereo speakers. If you crank the volume all the way up, it activates a 400% high volume mode, and it gets incredibly loud. If you love loud audio, you’ll be totally satisfied. That being said, clarity drops quite a bit in this mode, and the sound gets a bit sharp and harsh. But if you turn it down just one notch, the clarity improves dramatically, and the cool part is that it actually has decent bass. All things considered, I really liked the speakers for this price range.
Battery & Charger
The X7d has a massive 6500mAh lithium battery, which is a solid capacity. Inside the box, you’ll find a 35W charger that uses Honor’s SuperCharge technology.
In my 3 hour semi heavy usage test, the phone consumed 25% of its battery in total. As for the included charger, it juiced up the phone to 45% in 30 minutes and hit 100% in 70 minutes.
Honestly, I’m super happy with the battery life on this device. This phone will definitely give you peace of mind when it comes to battery endurance.
Performance
The Honor X7d is powered by the Snapdragon 6s Gen 3. This chip is built on Cortex A73 and A53 cores.
How does it perform in the UI and daily use? Well, you shouldn’t expect the speed of flagship phones because it’s just not as snappy navigating around. But it’s also not slow enough to be annoying. The phone offers acceptable speed for web browsing and scrolling through different apps, and it won’t leave you hanging.
The main priorities of this chipset are battery efficiency and keeping temperatures low, and it does a genuinely good job in those areas.
Camera
The photos captured by the X7d’s camera in natural daylight have good color accuracy and white balance, but the dynamic range isn’t amazing. Though, if you aren’t too picky, the dynamic range is acceptable.
When I cropped into the main camera’s photos, I actually liked the level of detail. Textures are captured well, keeping in mind the phone’s class, of course. If you compare it to higher end phones, naturally, the performance won’t hold up.
The brightness of the photos taken with the same camera at night is really good, and there’s absolutely no noise. The colors and white balance look natural too. The main camera’s night mode performs exceptionally well and completely transforms the image. Overall, the X7d has a solid main camera, and you can heavily rely on it for everyday photography.
The selfie camera surprised me. The photos it takes have fantastic clarity, and the textures look very natural. The colors are mostly accurate as well, though sometimes the camera gets a bit confused with the white balance and boosts the blue tones a bit too much. But generally speaking, it has a really great selfie camera.
