Introduction 

Ever since huawei parted ways with google we've seen quite a bit less hype for their phones and honor phones here in the west but now honor is an independent brand and its new honor 50 brings the full suite of google services on board this is good news for a lot of people in western markets but does the honor 50 pack enough punch to be competitive and  let's find out in our full review

Honor 50 review

 Design and build quality
The honor 50 has a lightweight glass design with plenty of curves the circular camera rings are an interesting design element and the thin frame is made of plastic here not metal the honor 50 is actually nearly identical to another recent device huawei's nova 9 the only real difference being a different main camera and the presence of google services

6.57'' OLED screen with 1080p resolution and 120Hz refresh rate

Just like the back the front screen of the phone has a curve to it it's a 6.57 inch oled with a 1080p resolution and a super fast 120hz refresh rate the high refresh rate coupled with a low touch latency means that swiping and scrolling here are super smooth and responsive and they're support for high frame rate gaming too plus there's support for 10 bit color and you get the great contrast you'd expect from an oled color accuracy is respectable depending on the setting you choose and brightness is good too we measured 525 nits maximum with the manual slider and it boosts up to 750 nits in bright

Under-display fingerprint reader

Conditions under the display is an optical fingerprint scanner which is responsive and reliable for audio you don't get a traditional headphone jack and there's just a single

Single bottom-firing speaker, no headphone jack

Bottom firing loudspeaker the loudness score was just average on our charts and the sound quality is clear but far from rich one of the more exciting things about

Software and UI

The honor 50 is its software package at least if you're one of the people bummed out by huawei's lack of google support the magic ui shares the aesthetics of huawei's emui 12 but with the intrinsic features of android 11 and of course access to google apps through the play store the default apps like the gallery and the phone are proprietary though one thing worth noting is that you don't get to split notification shade like on emui

Storage options 

A traditional one here and you don't have expandable storage on the honor 50 but the choice of 128 or 256 gigs on board under the hood of the honor 50 is a

qualcomm snapdragon 778 ge chipset

 Snapdragon 778G 5G performance

A pretty popular chip these days offering both 5g connectivity and flagship grade performance that's not quite as high tier as the snapdragon 888 both the interface and games run well here but we did notice some thermal throttling

Battery (4300mAh) endurance and charging (66W) test 

Battery life is pretty good considering the 4300 milliamp hour battery capacity the honor 50 was able to score 100 hour endurance rating in our proprietary tests charging speed is reasonably fast too but not lighting fast even though it comes with a large 66 watt charger with it we charge the phone from zero to 61 percent in half an hour the major hardware difference between the honor 50 and the huawei nova 9 is that this one has a higher res main

 Camera specs

Camera here you get a 108 megapixel nine in one main cam the others are the same as the nova 9 though an 8 megapixel ultra wide cam a 2 megapixel macro cam and a depth sensor during the day 12 megapixel photos from the main cam look good they're sharp and contrasty with saturated colors and okay dynamic range but we've seen a bit better rendition of fine details in the competition portraits look pretty good with great sharpness and detail and subject detection which is better than what we saw on the nova 9. 8 megapixel shots from the ultrawide are nothing special you get the benefit of the wider field of view but the images are rather soft and low in detail and have limited dynamic range the macro camera's photos are okay the detail is limited by the 2 megapixel resolution and colors could be punchier but sharpness is fine if you get the

focus distance right in low light photos from the main cam are pretty good there's a decent level of detail in the shadows and highlights are well contained too there's also great contrast and low noise if you shoot with a night mode on the

results can be even better especially in more challenging scenes the shadows are boosted a bit the remaining noise is cleaned up and there's additional

sharpness and the colors are a little bit more vivid shots from the ultra wide at night aren't very good they're fuzzy and lacking in detail with a narrow dynamic

range and there's no night mode support on this camera selfies are taken with a 32 megapixel front facing cam and they're good they're detailed colorful and sharp enough plus the dynamic range is pretty wide and the selfies come out usable even in backlit situations

 Video quality

Videos can be recorded with the main cam and up to 4k resolution at 30fps footage comes out sharp and detailed with great colors and contrast dynamic range is wide too the ultra wide cam is limited to 1080p resolution and its footage has similar contrast and colors to the main cam it's a lot softer and less detailed though electronic stabilization is supported in 4k on the main cam and it does a good

 Conclusion

Job in smoothing out the shakiness from walking around so that's the honor 50. it has an impressive 120hz curved oled display dependable battery life fast charging and a good camera experience at least from the main cam and you get google services on and on our phone the problem is that the way the honor 50 is priced it's up against some tough competition flagship killer phones that can offer more in both the chipset and the camera department you're also missing some popular features like stereo speakers so while the honor 50 is a decent phone you can find more bang for your buck elsewhere

thanks for reading guys stay safe 

see you on the next one