Huawei Nova 2i

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Reviews for the Huawei Nova 2i

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Model: The Huawei Nova 2i is one of the best-value selfie smartphones that features a FullView Display and four cameras. At this moment, FullView displays are already a thing and all smartphone manufacturers are going this direction. By removing the home button, Huawei has taken advantage of integrating a 5.93-inch display on the front. Before the bezel-less display trend, having a display more than 5.5-inch was considered as a phablet but in the Nova 2i's case, it doesn't feel like one. The front display blends in nicely with the sides, making it look high class and premium. The body material on the back is polished and looks great in blue. However, a user may want to get a protective casing because it can be quite slippery on sweaty palms. The Nova 2i holds the distinction of being Huawei’s first ever smartphone to have an 18:9 display. That allows the phone to have a 5.9-inch full HD+ panel while still having the same overall physical dimensions of a 5.5-inch phone. The extra pixels on the top and bottom as well as the almost non-existent bezels on the side allow the phone to have a resolution of 1080 x 2160 pixels, giving its user more screen real-estate on the top and bottom. As for the display quality, the Nova 2i’s display looks pretty great. Colors are vibrant and punchy, and the display is easily readable under the sun. Unfortunately, not all apps are optimized for the new aspect ratio. YouTube, for example, displays black bars on the sides when viewing content in landscape mode. Huawei’s EMUI 5 does not have a way to crop content to fit everything into the 18:9 display like Samsung does with the Galaxy S8, S8+ or Note 8.

Running on Android 7 Nougat (plus Huawei's own EMUI skin), the Huawei Nova 2i comes powered by an 8-core Kirin 659 chipset, 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of onboard storage. The Kirin 659 is a pretty capable processor, and the phone felt quick and snappy. However, heavy gamers and more performance-focused consumers may be a little annoyed with the graphics-crunching capabilities of the Nova 2i though, since it comes with a Mali-T830 GPU. The quad-camera promise of the phone may feel a little gimmicky, but it really delivers great image quality for its price. With four sensors scattered in its body, both the 16-megapixel rear camera and 13-megapixel front camera are paired with 2-megapixel depth sensors that add depth information to each shot so that the user can add bokeh effects later. The overall performance of the rear camera is pretty awesome even under low light. The Nova 2i comes with a 3,340 mAh battery inside of its sleek, aluminum body. That is enough to keep it running for around 7 hours on a single charge, which is an average score for a smartphone like this. The Nova 2i is a great mid-range smartphone but lacks some newer features such as fast charging and a USB Type-C support.

Hands-on article by Jagadisa Rajarathnam

ARM Mali-T830 MP2: Integrated graphics card for smartphones and tablets with two clusters (MP2) supporting OpenGL ES 3.2. Only some 3D games with very low demands are playable with these cards. » Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.
Kirin 659: ARM-based octa-core SoC (4x Cortex-A53 max. 2.36 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 max 1.7 GHz) with an integrated LTE modem (Cat. 13) and a ARM Mali-T830 MP2. In our benchmarks around 4% faster as the older Kirin 658.» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.
5.9":

This display is quite big for a smartphone but frequently used for smartphones.

Large display-sizes allow higher resolutions. So, details like letters are bigger. On the other hand, the power consumption is lower with small screen diagonals and the devices are smaller, more lightweight and cheaper.  

» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.
0.164 kg:

Only few smartphones are more lightweight than this.

Huawei: Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese company founded in 1987 with focus on telecommunications hardware and 170000 employees. In the first quarter of 2016, Huawei had a market share of 8.2% in the smartphone market, making it the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Compared to the same quarter of 2015, Huawei increased its market share by more than 58%.
In 2014, Huawei created the sub brand Honor and offers certain smartphone series under this name. The name Huawei is usually not listed for these products.
There are a lot of reviews on Huawei phones with slightly above average ratings (as of 2016).
78.29%: This rating is not convincing. The laptop is evaluated below average, this is not really a recommendation for purchase.
» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.

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