Honor 70 Review – Beautiful midrange camphone

Intended as the successor to last year’s Honor 50 camphone, the updated Honor 70 is the brand’s titular camphone for 2022 with a host of upgrades across the board and a more powerful camera sensor but is it worth the money? Our Honor 70 review puts their flagship camphone to the test to find out!

Honor 70 Review – Build and Design

The Honor 70 is a camera-centric Android smartphone with full access to the Google Play store and features a contemporary design that takes cues from higher end flagship phones. Up front, you have the main draw to the phone, a 6.57-inch FHD+ resolution OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a tall 20:9 aspect ratio that gently curves to the sides to make it more comfortable to wield.

Up top, it has a rounded punch hole for the front-facing 32MP selfie camera while the lower quadrant of the display has an under-display fingerprint reader for biometric authentication.

The frame itself comes in a deep iridescent green finish with the base of the phone featuring a mono speaker, a dual nano SIM card tray along with the customary USB Type-C port for charging and docking duties while the top and left sides of the Honor 70 are otherwise bare. The right side features a power button and volume rocker.

Our Honor 70 review sample features a backplate that’s done up in what they have designated as an Emerald Green finish which works out to a semi-reflective satin deep metallic green colourway that is easily one of the most unique paint jobs seen in aeons.

The finish  looks classy and eye-catching without being overly gaudy, has moderate resistance to fingerprints and simply looks fantastic under sunlight. If you’re looking for something a bit gaudier, the Crystal Silver finish that features an iridescent metallic weave design can easily be seen from a dozen paces away.

The upper left corner of the backplate features two rounded housings for the triple camera array which, combined with the distinctive Emerald Green satin finish, makes it stand out from the array of midrange phones in the market.

In terms of overall build quality, the Honor 70 does not disappoint with its premium looking design and even heft, offering a look and feel akin that can match pricier designs. Unfortunately, the Honor 70 lacks water and dust resistance so some care needs to be taken to protect it from the elements.

As a nice touch, Honor has added a comprehensive array of accessories to go with the phone and for the price of entry, you’re getting everything you need to get it up and running straight out of the box. You get a pre-applied screen protector up front, a soft TPU casing to protect the backplate, a SIM eject pin, a fast 66W charger and USB-C cable.

Honor 70 Review – Specifications and Performance

In terms of hardware, the Honor 70 punches in the upper echelons of midrange phones in terms of its specifications. Our Honor 70 review sample runs on the Snapdragon 778G+ 5G processor which is a midrange SoC with a quartet of high-performance 2.5GHz ARM Cortex A78 cores and a quartet of smaller ARM Cortex A55 1.9GHz cores to handle the general grunt work along with an Adreno 642L processor.

Astute readers will note that it’s a slightly improved variant of the Snapdragon 778G processor built on a similar 6nm process and retains a similar Adreno 642L GPU but has a slightly faster clock speed versus its predecessor which maxes out at 2.4GHz. 

As you’d surmise from its nomenclature, the Honor 70 retains 5G connectivity and also retains full access to the Google Play store and all the apps it has to offer.

There’s still a parallel app store dubbed the Honor App market that has their own curated apps but it isn’t as comprehensive as the Google Play Store. MagicUI 6.1 also throws in a modest bit of bloatware including a pre-installed copy of WPS Office, Trip.com and Booking.Com though these can be easily removed without issue.

The Snapdragon 778G+ 5G SoC on the Honor 70 is paired with 8GB RAM and also has 2GB of vRAM on demand by partitioning part of its onboard storage.

Unfortunately, Magic UI 6.1 does not currently have a means of adjusting the amount of vRAM available so you’re stuck with 2GB for now though this, in tandem with 8GB RAM is plenty for most day to day tasks and games.

Storage needs are handled by 256GB of fast UFS 3.1 onboard storage which is expected of an upper-tier midrange phone though it’s non-expandable. While variants exist with more storage and more RAM in other regions, Malaysia only has one storage/RAM variant available for sale in three colourways.

Here’s how the Honor 70 for Malaysia stacks up on paper:

Price	RM1,999
Display	6.67-inch OLED, 1080 x 2,400 pixels, 120Hz, 20:9 aspect ratio, HDR10+
Processor	Snapdragon 778G+ 5G
OS	Android 12 w/ Magic UI 6.1
Memory	8GB RAM + 2GB RAM Turbo / 256GB UFS 3.1 storage
Camera	54MP F/1.9 w/ PDAF AI Matrix Camera + 50MP F/2.2 ultra wide angle w/ Autofocus + 2MP F/2.4 depth sensor [rear] / 32MP F/2.4 [front]
Battery	4,800mAh w/ 66W fast charging
Size/Weight	161/4 x 73.3 x 7.9mm /178g

When subjected to synthetic benchmarks, our Honor 70 review sample got the following results. Oddly enough, the OpenCL test in Geekbench 5 was greyed out and unavailable

3DMark Wild Life	2,659
3DMark Wild Life Unlimited	2,656
3DMark Wild Life Extreme	740
3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited	739
Geekbench 5 Single core	818
Geekbench 5 Multi core	2,845
Geekbench 5 Vulkan	2,411
Geekbench 5 OpenCL	N/A
PCMark Work 3.0	12,713
PCMark Battery Life	11 hours 42 minutes

Our Honor 70 review sample has a performance envelope fairly indicative of a midrange phone with benchmarks that are slightly better than the Galaxy A73 5G which runs on the slightly older Snapdragon 778G SoC. 

In day to day use, the Honor 70 handled almost all tasks asked of it without slowing down. Even under extended gaming, the backplate was only modestly warm without it cooking off.

Despite the inability to modify the existing 2GB of vRAM baked-in, the phone was more than up to the task, swapping between a dozen open browser tabs without issue, ran Call of Duty Mobile and the new Diablo Immortal on high settings smoothly.

The provided OLED display has a 120Hz dynamic refresh rate with 1080 x 2,400 pixels resolution with support for HDR10+ content and a quoted 300Hz touch sampling rate.

By default, the display is set to a dynamic refresh rate that adjusts based on what content appears onscreen but if you’re looking to save on battery life, you can limit it to 60Hz.

In terms of screen quality, the Honor 70 does not disappoint with vibrant colour rendition and pin-sharp text along with good clarity under direct sunlight and in fast-paced games the screen proved responsive to taps and swipes without any noticeable lag. 

While the visuals are excellent on the Honor 70, the sole fly in the ointment here is its mono speaker at the base of the phone that does not do it justice.

Compared to other competing phones that also have mono speakers, the Honor 70’s sole speaker at the base does a fair job with relatively good volume but if you need to listen to subtler tracks or movies with more detailed sound staging, you’ll have to default to using a pair of wireless earbuds.

In terms of battery life, the Honor 70 acquitted itself in a satisfactory fashion with 11 hours and 42 minutes of battery life when tested with the PCMark battery life benchmark.

Under practical usage conditions with a combination of data and WiFi, constant use of social media and emails through the day with a couple of hours of Google Doc usage with an hour or so of Call of Duty Mobile, the Honor 70 managed to last a full day with enough to last the commute home with a total of about 10 hours or so of active usage.

Charging it doesn’t take long via the bundled 66W fast charger and it managed to get a full charge in about 50 minutes.

Honor 70 Review – Cameras

The Honor 70 sports a rather unusual triple camera system. The primary snapper is a 54MP F/1.9 camera that is the first to use the new Sony IMX800 sensor paired with a huge 50MP F/2.2 ultra wide angle camera that has a 122-degree field of view. The third camera is an afterthought and is simply a 2MP depth sensor. 

This setup allows you to capture shots from 0.5x ultrawide all the way to 10x digital zoom for stills and up to 4K@30fps and 6x digital zoom for video.

Up front, the 32MP selfie camera is able to capture selfies and up to 1080p@60fps video. One interesting thing to note here is that none of the cameras on the Honor 70 feature optical image stabilisation (OIS) hardware and instead rely primarily on electronic image stabilisation (EIS) and the the large 54MP and 50MP sensor on the ultra wide and primary cameras to mitigate hand judder for stills and videos.

In daylight conditions, the ultrawide and primary cameras serve up great shots that offer great dynamic range and good detail all the way out to 2x zoom. At 10x digital zoom, you can still get viewable snaps but details become soft. Of note here is the large 50MP ultra wide angle camera that offers significantly better detail than the usual smaller ultra wide cameras festooning other midrange phones.

Things get a bit dicey in dim light conditions and the lack of OIS here means that you’ll need some patience and a steady hand but you’re able to yield pretty good shots off the cuff with the provided Night mode yielding better dynamic range and salvaging detail from stills though anything zoomed in beyond 1x will look distinctly soft. 

The front-facing selfie camera does well for video calls and is able to offer serviceable selfies in daylight and in moderately dim light conditions like an indoors bar. It will likely see the most utility for Zoom calls and for those attempting TikTok videos.

In terms of video capture, the Honor 70 works best with steady hands though the EIS helps address modest hand shakes and offers relatively steady video if taken at a sedate walking pace with good detail and dynamic range for 4K footage on the rear.

It also features a slew of novel vlogger-centric modes like Solo Cut mode that uses AI to ensure that focus is retained on one person across the entirety of a video. It also has a multi video mode that simultaneously captures a feed on the front and rear cameras. Both features come in especially handy especially for vloggers and TikTok users.

Should you buy the Honor 70 smartphone?

The Honor 70 makes for an interesting alternative choice for a midrange phone. It plays to its strengths with premium build quality, an excellent display, good performance and a solid set of cameras to cater to most scenarios encountered by general users though it lacks water resistance and OIS for its cameras though this is compensated by its large sensors and EIS.

This is well worth a look especially for those seeking a solid all-rounder under RM2,000.

Honor 70 review sample courtesy of Honor Malaysia. For more details and to purchase, please visit https://www.hiHonor.com/my/phones/Honor-70/