Honor 70 Lite: Stylish budget phone with impressive performance and battery

Honor 70 Lite. Picture: Noel Campion.

The Honor 70 Lite smartphone was the first Honor handset to launch here in Ireland, although the company was founded in 2013 as a Huawei sub-brand. I’ve been testing the budget 70 Lite for the last few weeks to see if this budget phone is worth your money.

Design

My Three review unit arrived in the black variant, which seems to be the only colour available on three.ie. The side rails are matte, while the plastic back panel is glossy and has a fingerprint magnet. The corners are rounded, and the edges are comfortable to hold. The bottom edge has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a small hole for the mic, a USB-C port and five round holes for the speaker grille. The left edge has the SIM tray with a nano-SIM and a microSD card for additional storage. The right edge has a volume rocker and a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader.

Around the back is the camera module, which sports a triple camera system with a 50MP main camera and a flash that looks like a fourth camera.

The front of the phone has an 8MP selfie camera with a teardrop cutout on the top and centre of the 6.5-inch display. The front is just as much of a fingerprint magnet as the back, but it does come with a pre-installed screen protector, which is always welcome.

The overall build quality is what you’d expect from a budget phone, but it looks stylish and more premium than the price tag would suggest.

Display and sound

The 6.5-inch display has reasonably thin bezels for an LCD panel and includes telltale signs that it’s not a more expensive OLED panel thanks to a larger chin, not-so-great viewing angles and duller colours. That said, it’s one of the better LCDs I’ve seen on the phone in this price range and even includes a 90Hz refresh rate that makes everything feel a little smoother. The display resolution is only 720 x 1,600 pixels, but it looks sharp.

The 70 Lite features a mono speaker, and the sound quality isn’t great. Of course, you can always use Bluetooth headphones or go retro and plug in some wired headphones.

Hardware and performance

Sporting the Snapdragon 480+ chipset, which includes a 5G chipset, the 70 Lite is about average for a budget phone in terms of overall performance. It only comes with 4GB of RAM, so it will slow down if you overload it with too many open apps. It’s more than capable of performing routine tasks, including scrolling through social feeds, watching videos and even playing light games.

The internal memory of 128GB should be enough for average users, but this can be boosted by adding a microSD card.

The Magic UI 6.1 skin on Android 12 offers a wide range of capabilities and doesn't make the phone feel slower than if it was pure stock Android.

Cameras

The main 50MP camera can capture excellent photos in good light, but like all budget phones, detail and colour will suffer in dim lighting conditions. The AI software isn’t on par with what you’ll get on a Google Pixel device either, so HDR, noise reduction and other computation imaging processing can only do so much to improve images, especially when the phone is equipped with a less capable CPU. The two other cameras are a 2MP macro camera, which can be a bit of fun but not incredibly useful, and a 2MP ToF sensor, which helps to capture depth information for things like portrait mode.

The camera app is great and easy to use. The interface is clutter-free and has excellent features, including Night, Aperture, High-res, HDR, Pro and Panorama modes.

Video capture tops out at 1080p at 30fps, which is fine, but there are no stabilisation modes.

Battery and Other

It’s impressive to see a 5,000 mAh battery in a budget phone like this, and you should be able to get up to two days on a single charge. Unfortunately, while it does support 22.5W wired charging, Honor doesn’t include a charging brick in the box. Not surprisingly, the phone doesn’t support wireless charging.

Verdict

The Honor 70 Lite is, first and foremost, a budget phone. Despite its compromises to reach an affordable price point, it looks great, performs well, has great battery life and a massive screen.

Honor 70 Lite from €150 on PrePay at Three.ie

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