Huawei Nova 3 Full Review: A mid-ranger that you cannot deny.

Couple year back the devices from the Huawei didn’t use received much attendance in the market. There weren’t much UPS about those devices, But things has changed, now the company has been able to establish itself among the top players in the market. In last quarter, the company with the devices like Huawei P20 Pro has overtaken Apple to be the second ranked smartphone manufacturer in the world.

The same thing is going on in Nepal market as well, the company has built its brand value. With the launch of last year’s Nova2i first four camera phone, the company is strongly marketing its products. After the launch of premium devices like P20 Pro and budget friendly devices like Y-series devices, the company has launched premium mid-ranger Huawei Nova 3 and 3i. These are main priority devices of company in Nepalese market. Among these two devices, we had Nova 3 since last one month. Here is our review of the Nova 3.

Design

The Huawei has continued with 2018 version of the smartphone, with thin bezels, and notch. There is a metal frame holding two glass on the back and front. The back glass has curved edges, almost melting into the glossy frame. The device feels premium on hands and comfortable to hold also, however you must be careful, you never know when will it slip from your hand. Since the back glass is quite thin and looks fragile, there is a huge possibility that it might crack even with the light touch of the other hard material, which just happened to us. Even though the company provides a transparent flexible cover inside the box, it won’t protect your device that much. If you really want to protect your device, get a rugged cover, highly recommended.

Talking further about the design of Nova 3, there is a couple of optics sensor at the back, on the top left corner along with LED flash. Since there is no any dedicated button on the front, the fingerprint sensor is placed at the back. I think the fingerprint sensor is at its perfect place. Another positive thing about the design is almost negligible branding or text on the device, which makes the looks pretty clean.

At the bottom, there are a 3.5mm audio jack, Type-C port, mic, and mono speaker. On the right, volume rocker and the power button, at the top dedicated noise cancellation port and last on the right, SIM tray and memory slot. This device does not have IR blaster which is little un-expected because even other budget smartphones have it

I liked the overall design, ports and the button. However, placement of the volume rocker and power button should have been in different place or little bit more gap between them. Almost every time I try to volume down the sound, I end up locking the device. Overall, the design is sleek and looks gorgeous.

Display

The display, it’s almost bezel-less, “but the notch” or “wow!! the notch”, pack dual camera, earpiece, and other sensors. Talking personally, I really really hate the notch. If you are like me and don’t want to see the notch, you can hide it. Yes, there is an option you can choose, in the settings, to hide the notch. Besides hiding notch, you can also toggle the screen resolution between HD+ and FHD+. It might save battery or just wondering the difference. Changing the screen resolution might change the screen clarity and also might affect some applications/games.

With 6.3 inches display, it’s beautiful. Being only the IPS display, it is still pretty vibrant with a variable scale of brightness level. The screen is pretty bright. The screen brightness levels are perfect as is sunlight legibility. So, if you watch videos on YouTube or gaming, you won’t be disappointed. Besides, the big screen provides a bigger space, which is the positive move. However, keep in mind that the front is not protected by Gorilla Glass, so do not drop it.

The front side is also the fingerprint magnet, actually, both sides are the fingerprint magnet. So, you have to clean the screen every time you use the device.

Camera

Huawei is selling the Nova series on the base of its cameras. Similar to its predecessor, the Nova 3 and 3i have four cameras, a couple on either side. Besides, the company also added new Artificial Intelligence (AI), where it can recognize over 200 scenarios across eight categories including Blue sky, Plant, and Beach. While the rear cameras are activated, the AI can automatically identify more than 500 typical scenarios across 22 categories. Moreover, the AI reads the contour, texture, color gradient, illumination of its camera subjects, and takes them into consideration together with depth information before executing the beautification process. The powerful algorithms account for the subject’s expression, outfit, pose, ambient lighting to improve the portrait taking experience.

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The cameras are fantastic, with HDR Pro mode on the selfie camera, it provides with bright backgrounds. Similarly, it comes with portrait mode and lighting options, edge detection and blur more are decent in performance. Besides, all these there is also AR stickers, though they don’t have much real-life usage, sometimes, its fun to fool around with friends and family.

Now, let’s talk about the real-life usage of the camera. The daylight photography is perfect, with both front and back sensors. The added AI feature helps to enhance the images by detecting the subject and background and adding tweaks on it. The low light images also came out quite fine and detailed, which I was not expecting at all.

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However, with AI enabled I noticed some disturbance in images. As I was taking the selfie, I noticed that my face looks very fair than I actually am. I also noticed that my moles were also hidden in the picture.

The bokeh effect also needs more improvement. It takes decent photos in bokeh mode, but there are some issues, like blurring the subject itself, or not blurring the background. However, with future software updates, these issues can be solved.

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Performance and Battery Life

Now, coming to the point, the performance is quite smooth, not much of disturbance. The Huawei Nova 3 packs Huawei’s in-house Kirin 970 chipset, paired with 6GB of RAM. That means, this device is a powerhouse, and yes, it is. Like most smartphones that don’t run stock Android, Huawei Nova 3 has its own UI, the EMUI 8.2.

After using for 4 weeks, I can say that it matches my expectation. While using the camera, playing the game or doing any other heavy task there is no any significant issue. It will go smoothly all the way. It’s been almost four weeks that I have been using the phone, I played a lot of games like Candy Crush, Marriage, Asphalt 9: Legends, Fortnite and of course the PUBG Mobile. While playing lightweight games, there was no disturbance at all. Even in Asphalt 9: Legends, the performance was quite smooth.

While in my first impression, I played the PUBG Mobile for 4-5 hours, where I felt no disturbance, even setting the graphics to HD and Frame Rate to High, there was no issue. However, after using it for 4 weeks, I began to notice some issue. The game began to lag and freeze, even in Graphics HD and Frame Rate High. So, there is no point of setting it to HDR and Ultra frame rate. However, there was no such issue with the Asphalt 9, the game is running smoothly. Well in coming months the company is issuing software update, which will feature company’s hyped GPU Turbo technology. So, we are hoping gaming will be enhanced better with the GPU Turbo.

Talking about the battery life, it’s awesome. The company has packed a 3750mAh battery, with fast charging capability. As expected, there was no issue for a whole day, even if you go hunting the Chicken Dinner for 1-2 hours daily, there will be some juice left till next charge.

Huawei Nova 3 Verdict

Overall, the Huawei Nova 3 has premium build quality, feels quite comfortable while holding in hands. Since, its huge phone, you cannot use single-handedly, unless you have huge hands. With the in-house built processor, and 4/6GB of RAM it’s a powerhouse, one cannot deny it easily. The camera sensors and AI on it have added a bonus feature to the customers. Actually, the camera was better than I expected, you won’t be disappointed.

Besides all these designs and internal specs, I must appreciate, how they have managed to keep the phone weight so light. Another thing is the Face Unlock feature, it’s quite good, while testing, the Face Unlock was quicker than other flagships.