IFA 2016 – Huawei announces new midrange Nova and Nova Plus phones

While Huawei’s P9 family of flagship phones are taking most of the limelight this year, they’re branching out with their unveiling of a new range of phones that they’ve dubbed the Nova series that’s angled for midrange buyers at IFA 2016. Rather than tacking on a ton of bells and whistles, the Nova along with it’s higher end sibling the Nova Plus aim to cover the essentials without busting the bank. Par for the course is a smooth, machined unibody aluminium casing that once used to be the province of high-end flagships, giving both phones a very polished look.

The midrange Nova revealed at IFA 2016 runs on a Snapdragon 625 processor and sports a 5-inch 1080P screen along with a unibody metal casing in one of three different colours

The Nova is 7.1mm thin and sports a 5-inch 1080P screen sheathed in 2.5D curved glass along with their Knuckle Sense tech that lets you rap it with your digits to take a screen cap and access app shortcuts by scrawling symbols onscreen. The phone runs on a 14nm Snapdragon 635 2.0Ghz octa-core processor with Android 6.0 Marshmallow overlaid with their EMUI 4.1 user interface. Paired with the Snapdragon 625 processor is 3GB RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. The rear comes with a 12-MP camera with PDAF and the ability to capture 4K video while the front has an 8-MP snapper. The 3,020mAh battery should offer a day and a half or so worth of battery life while charging duties are via the USB Type-C port. It also has a fingerprint reader too.

The Nova Plus has similar specs but upguns the display to a larger size with a larger rear 16-MP camera and a bigger battery than the Nova

The Nova Plus has similar specs to the Nova but bumps them up a notch with a tradeoff of slightly increased thickness at 7.3mm. It differs on account of a larger 5.5-inch 1080P display, also sheathed in 2.5D glass. The rear also has a better 16-MP camera with optical image stabilisation along with a larger 3,340mAh battery. Like the Nova, the Nova Plus also sports a fingerprint reader. Larger screen, camera and battery aside, the processor, RAM and hardware are similar to the Nova along with the fact that it runs Android Marshmallow.

Both the Nova and Nova Plus will come in three colours – Prestige Gold, Mystic Silver and Titanium Grey with the Nova retailer for  €399 (about RM1820) and the Nova Plus €429  (about RM1,957) when they release it in October in Europe and other markets. No word on a Malaysia release yet for these two phones but we’ll let you know if anything turns up.