Huawei Y7p Unboxing, Review: Your Next Budget Buddy?

Huawei Y7p Unboxing, Review: Your Next Budget Buddy?

Solid specs plus long battery life

After being announced and released quietly in Thailand a few weeks ago, Huawei has officially brought its new budget smartphone to the Philippines. It has many of the same features of the company’s more expensive Y9s at a more palatable price point, though with one small niggle.

Pros:

  • Beautiful exterior, excellent build quality
  • Good specs for the price
  • 48-megapixel camera delivers the goods
  • Long battery life

Cons:

  • Doesn’t have a fast charger out of the box

Packaging and contents

The Y7p comes in Huawei’s traditional packaging for its Y-series of phones.

There’s not a lot of deviation here from the formula we’ve seen previously: inside the box is the phone, documentation, a USB cable plus a regular, non-fast charging charger, as well as a silicone case. The phone has a pre-applied screen protector from the factory.

Budget phone, flagship-like externals

Say what you want about Huawei, but the company certainly knows how to make good-looking smartphones. The Y7p is not an exception to the rule – the rear of the phone looks extremely similar to the exterior of the more expensive Y9s, down to the Aurora Blue and Midnight Black colorway.

Unfortunately, the Y7p doesn’t share the same glass back as the Y9s, with the former sporting a plastic rear. Thankfully the phone ships with a free silicone case to keep the rear protected from scratches and bumps.

The phone has very similar dimensions to its more expensive brother, and similar hardware too – despite being a few thousand pesos cheaper, it has virtually the same triple camera layout at the rear as the Y9s. The biggest difference here is that the Y7p doesn’t have a pop-up camera module, and uses a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner instead of a side-mounted one.

No pop-up, just a hole (punch)

Unlike the Y9s, the Y7p doesn’t have a pop-up camera module. Instead, Huawei used a hole-punch camera module located on the upper left corner of the 6.39-inch, HD+ display. The camera module holds an 8-megapixel front camera with an f/2.2 aperture.

Despite being a smaller, less pixel-dense display, the Y7p’s panel looks bright and vivid, with good colors all around. The IPS panel performs well under sunlight, and that hole-punch module doesn’t really get in the way of watching movies or playing games once you get used to it.

Great camera for the price

One of the great things about the Y7p is the triple camera setup on it: the main camera is a 48-megapixel shooter with an f/1.8 lens, paired with an 8-megapixel f/2.4 ultra-wide-angle camera and a 2-megapixel f/2.4 depth sensor.

This is the same camera setup on the much more expensive Y9s, which makes the Y7p a good choice for cash-strapped buyers who want to check out if the hype over high-resolution snappers are legit or not.

Based on our experience with the Y7p though, we found that the main shooter pretty much performed similarly to the one on the Y9s.

Photos that were taken with the Y7p look decent enough with good color reproduction, decent exposure, and details. Low-light performance suffers a little bit with slightly washed-out details but nothing too major.

Excellent performance and long battery life, but there’s no Google Services

Just like the Y9s, the Y7p runs Huawei’s own, home-grown Kirin 710F processor.

The new processor is built on a 12nm process, and is good enough for day-to-day use, along with light to moderate gaming.

The Y7p has slightly lower storage and RAM setup than the Y9s (gotta differentiate SKUs somewhere, after all), with the former running 4GB of RAM along with 64GB of expandable storage.

The phone has EMUI 9.1 based on Android 9, but unlike the Y9s, the Y7p doesn’t come with Google’s Mobile Services pre-installed.

You can still install apps via Huawei’s App Gallery, the company’s own app store that the company has been strengthening ever since they were cut off by the US gov’t from Google.

While not having access to GMS is a bummer, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to install GMS on the Y7p (and other phones from Huawei that don’t come with GMS). That being said it’s definitely an annoying hurdle that consumers have to overcome.

The phone has a 4000mAh battery inside of it, and thanks to that power-efficient processor and less power-hungry display, the Y7p managed to clock in a time of 14 hours and 12 minutes on a single charge. Not bad.

Unfortunately, though the phone doesn’t ship with a fast charger out of the box, and uses the aging micro-USB standard instead of the more modern USB Type-C connector.

Verdict: a solid phone for the budget-conscious

If you were interested in getting Huawei’s Y9s but found the phone just out of your reach in terms of price, the Y7p looks to be a solid alternative.

Thanks to the deletion of a few, non-essential features like the glass back, full HD+ panel and pop-up camera, Huawei managed to bring down the price of the Y7p to under Php 10K. The Y7p is priced at just Php 9,990, around 4K less than its more expensive brother. Pre-order starts from February 22 until February 28, where customers get a Huawei Cm510 Bluetooth Speaker with their purchase, along with 50GB Huawei Cloud storage for two months and 500 Huawei Points.

The biggest hurdle with the Y7p is its lack of access to GMS. Thre are ways around it thanks to Huawei’s App Gallery and the eventual workarounds that’ll pop up once the phone is in circulation, but it’s still an annoying hurdle that some customers will have to endure.

Huawei Y7p Specs

  • 2.2GHz HiSilicon Kirin 710F octa-core processor
  • Mali-G51 MP4 GPU
  • 4GB of RAM
  • 6.39-inch HD+ punch-hole display
  • 64GB of expandable storage (up to 256GB via microSD)
  • Triple rear cameras: 48-megapixel f/1.8 main camera; 8-megapixel f/2.4 ultra-wide-angle camera, 2-megapixel f/2.4 depth sensor; with PDAF, LED Flash
  • 8-megapixel f/2.2 front camera
  • 4G, LTE (Dual SIM, Hybrid Tray)
  • WiFi, Bluetooth
  • GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS
  • Fingerprint scanner
  • Android 9 Pie with EMUI 9.1
  • 4000mAh battery with 10w charging

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