The Huawei Nova is a mid-range phone, designed to give you the look and feel of an expensive mobile, while cutting down some of the bits and bobs inside to keep the price well under that of top-end models.
It costs 399 Euros (around £345/$445/AU$585), but it remains to be seen how widely the Nova will be sold, with a UK release on the cards but no guarantee of a US or Australian launch. There's a reason why not every retailer under the sun is grabbing for this phone, as the price is quite high for a mid-range handset, particularly one with the Huawei name engraved across its back.
If you have a soft spot for the brand, though, this is a perfectly solid phone, it just lacks the aggressive pricing edge that has made us recommend entry-level and mid-range Huawei phones in the past. This is compounded by the falling prices of some 2016 flagships like the LG G5, which really aren't a wheelbarrow of cash more expensive.
It's also shown up by the OnePlus 3, which costs a similar amount but has some higher-end components.
Key features
- Higher-end than the Huawei mid-range norm
- … but pricier too
- There's a big brother if you want a larger screen
The Huawei Nova is a grade-A box-ticker. It has all the features you might ask for when trying to see whether a phone's worth its asking price, on paper at least.
It has a fingerprint scanner, a high-quality screen, an aluminium body and a solid set of cameras, that can outdo those you get in top budget phones like the Motorola Moto G4.
The main cut-down part of the Huawei Nova is the CPU. Its Snapdragon 625 brain isn't the fastest, being closer in abilities to some of the best-value £150-200 phones, again like the Moto G4, than top devices like the Huawei P9 and Samsung Galaxy S7. This doesn't ruin performance, but does increase loading times a little, particularly in games.
The screen is a fairly small 5-incher too, but this is deliberate, as this phone has a brother, the Huawei Nova+. That costs just 30 Euros (around £25/$35/AU$45) more, and has a larger 5.5-inch screen, as well as a higher spec camera.
What we get with the Nova family is a true mid-range series, where Huawei used to try to fit the mid-range experience into budget-price phones with mobiles like the Huawei Ascend G7. The issue is that we're seeing Huawei push up to the kind of prices we're more used to from companies like Samsung and Sony.
Huawei is no newcomer, and maybe it's time for phones like this to play head-to-head with the names even gadget-haters know. But we're a little sad to see Huawei lose its bargain hunter badge, particularly when it hasn't altered the software much.
The custom Huawei UI is what puts a lot of people off its phones. Be sure to read the software section of this review to find out if you might be among them.
Design and display
- High-quality metal build feels good
- The design is a bit too familiar for our liking
- Solid, if not class-leading 1080p screen
The Huawei Nova is an aluminium phone and it feels dense and hard, two properties that make a device feel like it is made of solid metal rather than a cheap phone with a metallic finish.
It's not all metal though, as there are plastic inserts at the top and bottom of its back. These bits of plastic are what tell you this is a slightly lower-cost phone than the iPhone 7 or Huawei P9, but you won't notice them when simply holding and using the phone.
It's a little hard to get excited about the Huawei Nova's design, though, because it looks like a half-dozen other phones Huawei has made over the years, including some cheaper models. You might expect a clever design spark to accompany the "Nova" name, but there isn't one. The build is solid, but the style is pedestrian.
If you're happy buying Huawei, you're probably not an obsessed phone fashionista, though, and the Huawei Nova has an exceptionally easy-going design for day-to-day use. A 7.1mm thickness and a 5.0-inch screen mean it's not a pocket-bulging phone.
It's very similar in size to the Samsung Galaxy S7, shaving off a half millimetre of width thanks to its ever-so-slightly smaller screen.
Like many Huawei phones, the Nova has a fingerprint scanner on the back. While it seems, anecdotally, a fraction slower than that of the Huawei P9, it's still very speedy and reliable, and unlocks the phone just by resting your finger in the indented sensor on the back. No button press is required.
The scanner sits right under where your forefinger naturally rests, and is a perfectly good alternative to the front scanners used in iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones, though less accessible when the phone is sat on a desk. Huawei has nailed fingerprint scanners for a while now, and it doesn't disappoint here.
Around the front, the Nova's screen is five inches across, with a resolution of 1080 x 1920. Look extremely close and you can just about tell it's not as sharp as the Samsung Galaxy S7, but you do have to try: it's super-sharp.
We came to the Huawei Nova after using the Sony Xperia XZ, and the screen on the Nova has much more relaxed, natural colours. It's not overblown, but is full and rich-looking.
This is an LCD screen, so doesn't have quite the contrast and blacks of an OLED, but it does use a good panel. Maximum brightness is strong, making outdoor use no problem, the one obvious weakness is that the brightness drops off when you look at the screen from an angle, but it's not a major issue for general use.
Typical of a Huawei, you can tweak the colour temperature to suit your eyeballs' tastes, making it look warmer or cooler. There's also an Eye Protection mode that makes the screen very orangey, cutting out some of the blue light that causes eyestrain. You see this all over the place now Apple has made it trendy with the iPhone's Night mode.
Interface and reliability
- No apps menu, just like an iPhone
- Needs tweaks to get the most out of
- Some users won't like Emotion UI
The Huawei Nova runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, with the custom Emotion interface pasted on top. You'll find this on all of Huawei's phones, and it's the most commonly criticised part of them.
It's iPhone-like in that it gets rid of the Android apps menu, flattening the system. Everything needs a place on your home screens, meaning you'll have to get your apps organised into folders if you don't want to be flicking back and forth between app pages every day.
If you already keep on top of things like that, there's no major drama, but the interface is higher-maintenance than standard Android.
What also lets the Huawei Nova down a bit is the basic look of the system, as the widgets look a little dated and some of the app icons lack style.
This is a paper-thin criticism and a fixable one, but it's part of why a phone like the Huawei Nova doesn't look or feel perfect fresh out of the box. Again, some effort is required.
Not too much effort though, as the Nova supports themes downloaded through an inbuilt app, letting you reskin the entire phone with a few screen taps. Several of the included ones are a bit iffy, but there are loads more to download online, for free.
The key is finding one that doesn't make third-party app icons look wonky, or that reduces the readability of text by making the wallpaper too close in brightness to the fonts. It's a shame there aren't a few better 'default' themes included with the Nova too, as we've reviewed Huawei phones with a stronger selection in the past.
We haven't experienced any major crashes or epic geriatric slow-downs in the Nova, but there are occasional glitches. Animated screen transition elements have flickered like ghosts in a cheap horror movie a few times, but nothing has ruined the performance of the phone.
The Nova doesn't get away bloat-free, with an unnecessary vMall link plastered on the home screen, and a few unwanted games and apps pre-installed. But none of this is significant enough that it should deter you from buying the phone.
Movies, music and gaming
- Speakers are a bit harsh-sounding
- Solid gaming despite mid-range CPU
- Tweak the Dolby DSP or your headphones will sound rubbish
Almost all good phones above £100 make for decent media devices these days. With a 1080p screen, 32GB of storage and a microSD slot to let you add to that, the Nova is a solid media buddy whether you like to play your own videos or watch Netflix.
Despite having only a mid-range processor, it performs just fine with high-end games too. It has the Adreno 506 GPU, which is powerful enough to get games running well at 1080p, even high-end titles like Asphalt 8.
The only games that slowed down to a fun-ruining extent were less well-optimised titles like Just Drive Simulator, whose frame rate goes down the toilet if you turn real-time shadows and upgraded visual effects on.
It's the sound side of the Huawei Nova that falters more obviously. Its speaker is hard and harsh-sounding, and not a pleasant listen at maximum volume.
The speaker is also easy to block when the phone is held in landscape. Like the iPhone 6S or Samsung Galaxy S7, it sits under a single grille on the bottom edge of the device. As the phone is fairly small you have to be careful about where your fingers sit.
You also need to tame the sound processing to avoid your headphones sounding processed and bass-heavy, thanks to DTS Headphone: X.
This is a brand of digital signal processing designed to make your earphones sound better. And it can, but as standard it's switched to a setting that can ruin the sound from a good pair. This is because the default mode is designed for a cheap pair of, presumably, bass-light earbuds, which clogs up the sound with a bassy fug.
If you buy a Huawei Nova, make sure you either turn DTS Headphone: X off in the settings menu or at least customise its mode in the Headphone: X app. It's yet another example of the Nova being a bit high-maintenance.
Specs and benchmark performance
- A mid-range CPU, but one that stays cool
- A way off flagship-style performance
- Enough grunt for 1080p
The Huawei Nova is one of the first phones to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, only pipped by the Asus Zenfone 3.
This is an octa-core processor with a 2.0GHz clock speed, but its cores are all the Cortex-A53 kind, used as the 'everyday' cores in some of 2015's and 2016's flagship mobiles.
The Snapdragon 625 sounds at first like a revved-up version of the processor in the Moto G4, the Snapdragon 617, but it's better than that as it uses a super-efficient 14nm architecture. That means it can reach a high clock speed without risking the kind of overheating the old Snapdragon 615 suffered from.
Playing 20 minutes of Asphalt 8, the Huawei Nova stays impressively cool, just a little warm towards the top of the back. The Snapdragon 625 is a good fit for a slim, metal phone, it can still get warm when you charge or the phone is left searching for 4G/3G signals, but that's true of any handset.
The Nova is more powerful than the budget Snapdragon 617 crowd, but still a league below something like the Galaxy S7, or even the Samsung Galaxy S6. Unless you're into CPU/GPU-roasting tasks like N64 game emulation, though, the main way you'll notice this is that some apps and games take slightly longer to load than they would in a true high-end phone.
This may be in part down to the Snapdragon 625's use of DDR3 rather than DDR4 RAM, although the RAM (of which the Nova has 3GB) is still faster than a lot of DDR3 phone memory.
Battery life
- Excellent battery stamina if you lay off streaming
- No fast charger included, which seems a bit stingy
The Huawei Nova has a 3020mAh battery, which is large for a 5.0-inch phone, particularly one with a 14nm processor.
Stamina out in the real world varies between decent and excellent, largely depending on how much you use a 4G data connection. The CPU itself is efficient, but the demands of a trickling data connection used when, for example, streaming podcasts, bring the Huawei Nova down to earth.
You'll still get a full day's use whether or not you stream a lot of audio, but when laying off podcasts and Spotify we very nearly got a full two days between charges.
This is one of the longer-lasting phones in its class. However, our standard video test suggests the display is quite power-hungry. Playing a 90-minute video at maximum brightness (and remember, the Nova screen is pretty bright) takes 20% off the battery. That's 3% more than the Moto G4, and a whole 7% more than the Samsung Galaxy S7.
The Nova isn't a stamina world-beater, but rather a mix of efficient and less efficient parts that generally result in solid stamina.
Charging it back up is a mild annoyance, as the Huawei Nova has a new-style USB-C port, but it doesn't come with a fast charger. You just get a regular 2A one that will take a couple of hours to replenish the phone. Get hold of a fast charger (the kind that increases voltage rather than current) and it may charge more quickly, though.
Camera
- Fab photos on a sunny day
- Bad photos at night
- Camera app seems like a dodgy take on Apple's
The Huawei Nova has a slightly less impressive-sounding camera than its big brother, the Huawei Nova+. It uses a 12MP sensor on the rear with a single-LED flash and an 8MP selfie camera. The Nova+ has a 16MP rear camera.
The Nova has a 1/2.9-inch sensor, making each sensor pixel 1.25 microns across. That's smaller than the Samsung Galaxy S7 or Nexus 5X sensor pixels, but still larger than the 1.1-micron standard of 2014-2015.
In practice, it's a setup of highs and lows. The best bit: daylight images can look fantastic, sharp down to the pixel and with punchy colour. Despite the conservative resolution, shots in optimal lighting have loads of detail.
Use the Huawei Nova to shoot on a day when the sky is blue and the sun is bright and you can't do much better at the price.
It does struggle in other conditions, though. The Huawei Nova doesn't have optical image stabilisation, and it really shows. Night shots look fuzzy and low on detail, because the sensor has to ramp up to ISO 3200 sensitivity, and it's fairly easy to take blurry shots despite the minimum shutter speed of 1/17 of a second.
The Nova also doesn't perform quite enough dynamic range optimisation, which is a bit of a surprise as it's something Huawei is usually good at. In most conditions the metering (brightness) aims to avoid overexposure primarily, which can make darker areas look quite shadowy.
You can improve this with a post-shoot edit, but recent Huawei phones have offered better in-camera tweaks. In some situations, the lens also causes some purple outlining of objects, a sign the f/2.2 lens is less than perfect. There's also around a half-second of shutter lag, making shooting feel less than instant.
Like other Huawei phones, the Nova's camera app is largely a rip-off of Apple's, but with a slightly complicated menu of bonus modes tacked-on. These include HDR and a decent manual mode.
The Huawei Nova's front camera is more successful, with a great 8MP sensor and f/2 lens. We've found that even in patchy indoors lighting it's able to reliably bring out details like little beard hairs. There are plenty of 8MP front-facing cameras out there these days, but this is among the stronger ones.
Verdict
The Huawei Nova is a mid-range phone that flirts with the high-end in a few areas, including its high-quality aluminium frame. It doesn't have a particularly striking design to match, but in terms of pure quality of construction it's close to the Huawei Mate S and Huawei P9.
It's highly pocketable and lasts longer than much of the competition between charges too.
Where it gets difficult is when you start looking at the price against some of the specs. The camera is good in daylight but poor at night, and while the CPU performs well enough, it's still a mid-range processor that might not look so hot in a couple of years.
Who's this for?
The Huawei Nova is a phone for those who have lost faith in Samsung, Sony and LG, those looking for another phone-maker to try out. It's also for those who want a phone with a high-end flavour, but with a price lower than the kind of handsets you see advertised on giant billboards, and the sides of buses.
Should you buy it?
The Huawei Nova isn't a killer phone, but it is a good one if you like the idea of a small phone that feels expensive but costs a lot less than the Samsung Galaxy S7. If "small" isn't among your main aims, though, the OnePlus 3 is a better deal. The Nova is a phone to snap up if you find a particularly good deal, as there's otherwise quite a lot of competition at the price.
Competition
There's plenty of competition in the mid-range, including some surprisingly high-end handsets with impressively low prices. The following four phones are key rivals to the Huawei Nova.
OnePlus 3
This is where the Huawei Nova really gets in trouble. The OnePlus 3 is better in every respect bar battery life, and seems like a much higher-end phone in person.
It has a much higher-end processor and a camera that fares far better at night. You have to buy the OnePlus 3 direct from OnePlus unless you nab a secondhand one, but at the time of writing the Nova isn't exactly the easiest phone to buy either.
With a 5.5-inch screen the OnePlus 3 is a significantly larger device though, so if you want something small it's not for you.
- Read our OnePlus 3 review
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge
Is this cheating? If you're willing to do some research and buy a phone SIM-free, you can now get the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge for just a little more money than the Huawei Nova.
Once again, it's much better than the Huawei Nova in every respect bar battery life. The ultra-high resolution 1440 x 2560 AMOLED screen and excellent camera are of particular note.
Despite being older the Galaxy S6 Edge is also a lot more powerful, and has a 14nm processor just like the Nova.
- Read our Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge review
iPhone SE
There's no greater proof that the Huawei Nova costs quite a lot than that you can get a new iPhone for a somewhat-similar price. Granted, it's the dinky iPhone SE, but it feels just as 'premium' as the Nova.
This is Apple's tiny iPhone, with just a 4.0-inch screen. Phones with displays this small are incredible rare these days, even among budget devices.
The iPhone SE also has plenty of power and a decent camera, and is worth considering if you're more into iOS, or just want something super compact.
- Read our iPhone SE review
Samsung Galaxy A5
The Samsung Galaxy A5 is perhaps Samsung's closest alternative to the Huawei Nova. It's due a refresh, but these days sells for a chunk less than the Nova.
That's right, Huawei has been undercut by Samsung: who would have thought that would happen?
The Galaxy A5 isn't as well-built as the Nova, and doesn't have quite as up-to-date a processor. But the two are otherwise fairly comparable. It makes us miss Huawei's old bargain hunter-pleasing instincts.
- Read our hands on Samsung Galaxy A5 review
First reviewed: September 2016
