Huawei launched the Honor X1, the company’s latest tablet with voice calling capabilities in India few weeks back. It was originally announced as MediaPad X1 at the MWC 2014 earlier this year. Priced at Rs. 19,999, the tablet comes with a 7-inch full HD display, SIM support with voice calling capabilities and 3G connectivity. Is the tablet worth the price? Let us find out in the complete review.
Display, Design and Hardware
The Honor X1 has a 7-inch full HD screen with a resolution of 1200 by 1920 pixels at a pixel density of 323PPI. The display looks brilliant with vibrant color output since it uses a LTPS (Low temperature polysilicon) type screen and has 178 degree wide viewing angle. The 10-point multi-touch screen is highly sensitive and even has gloves mode. Since the pixel density is high, content looks sharp, but the sunlight legibility is not the best and the display is too glossy, hence it is prone to fingerprints. It doesn’t have a scratch-resistant glass, so the display is prone to scratches. You can easily notice minimal bezels on the sides with 2.99 mm narrow frame, making it compact for comfortable one-handed usage.
It has an earpiece on the top for voice calling. There is a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video recording and the usual set of sensors next to the camera. It even has an LED notification light next to the sensors, which is hardly visible when it’s not glowing.
It has on-screen buttons, but there is a small bezel below the display.
The tablet is just 7.18mm thick. The power/lock button and the volume rockers are present on the right side. You can also see the micro SIM slot and the microSD card slot.
These trays can be removed using the bundled ejector tool. The microSD card slot is of the far left and the micro SIM slot is present on the far right. The micro USB slot is on the bottom along with a primary microphone hole and the 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top along with a secondary microphone hole.
Most part of the back have brushed aluminum finish with plastic finish on the top and the bottom. The build quality is pretty good, but the brushed aluminium back is prone to scratches. Even the plastic part gets scratched easily when you place the tablet on a rough surface. The loudspeaker grill is present on the bottom plastic surface.
It has a 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash. The tablet is just 103.9mm wide and has a screen-to-body ratio of 80%, making it one of the most compact 7-inch tablets.
Camera
It has a 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash. The Camera UI is simple and is similar to the UI on other Huawei devices with Emotion UI 2.0. It has object tracking, GiF capture and Capture Smiles. Daylight shots were good, but some shots seem dull in cloudy conditions. Thanks to the f/2.2 aperture, macro shots were pretty good. HDR shots are brighter than the normal shots since the saturation is more. Low-light shots are decent and flash helps in such conditions. Overall the camera is pretty good for a tablet. Even the 5MP front-facing camera is decent for video calls.
Check out the camera samples. (Click to view full resolution image)
Daylight
It can record videos at 1080p resolution at 30fps. Video is good too. Since it has a secondary microphone, audio is crisp. Check out the full HD video sample.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK2eIoF2p78
Software
The Huawei Honor X1 runs on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) with Huawei’s own Emotion UI 2.0 on top. Huawei has promised Android 4.4 (KitKat) update for the tablet, but no details about the timeframe of the roll out. The Emotion UI 2.0 is better than the Emotion UI 1.5 that we had seen on last year’s Huawei devices.The user interface is similar to those phones without a separate menu, so all the apps are present in the home screen. You don’t need to create a shortcut for app and can access all the important apps by arranging them into a folder.
You can swipe to clear the applications when you press the multitasking button or use the clean icon on the bottom to remove everything. It also shows the RAM details on the top. You can press and hold empty part of the screen to set wallpapers, transitions, widgets, thumbnails or rearrange icons. The notification panel has a set of toggles on the top, and extends down to show more toggles. You can switch the set of icons in the first row.
It has motion control with options such as flip to mute, pick up to reduce ring volume, raise to ear to answer or make calls, shake to rearrange, tilt to move icons and widgets, swipe twice to answer calls and enable the display by double touch. It also has some hover gestures to preview album, video, event in calendar and enlarge text on a webpage.
Out of 16GB of internal storage you get 12.2GB of user storage. Out of 2GB of RAM, about 627MB of RAM is free when the table is idle. It even has a built-in storage cleaner to clean cache. You can also move compatible apps the SD card.
Apps
It comes with the usual set of utility apps and Google apps. It also has official Flipkart app and Flipkart eBooks app since the company has an exclusive partnership with Flipkart. It has Kingsoft Office and DLNA apps. The tablet doesn’t come with any other bloatware.
Music Player and Video Playback
It has custom music player that can play a range of audio formats. It has DTS enhancements that increases the audio. The loudspeaker output is pretty good. The stock video player can play 1080p full HD videos in a range of video formats smoothly.
SIM and Connectivity
It has 3G HSPA+ with voice calling capabilities, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and GPS capabilities. It also has USB on-the-go (OTG) support. It has option to disable Wi-Fi or 3G data for particular apps, so that you can prevent some apps that’s using data. Calls went through fine without any dropped calls.
Performance and Benchmarks
It is powered by a Huawei’s own quad-core HiSilicon Kirin 910 processor based on ARM’s Cortex A9 clocked at 1.6 GHz per core. It has ARM Mali 450 GPU. The performance is pretty good without any lags. Thanks to 2GB RAM, multitasking is pretty good. Check out the synthetic benchmark scores below.
Quadrant Benchmark
It managed to score 5584 points in the Quadrant benchmark.
AnTuTu Benchmark 4
In the AnTuTu Benchmark 4, it scored 22,332 points and grabs third spot.
Vellamo 2 HTML5
It managed to score 1723 points in the Vellamo 2 HTML5 browser benchmark. Check out the complete set of Huawei Honor X1 benchmarks here. The aluminum back gets heated a bit, but it doesn’t get too hot. We tried several games, including some high-end games. Most games were fine, graphics could be better in some games. Overall it scored 3.5/5 in our gaming test. Check out the gaming review below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02mnNMPtz04
Battery Life
Coming to the battery life, the 5000mAh battery lasts for the whole day even with heavy use such as 3G, video playback, few calls and intensive gaming. It will last for two days with average use and more than that with minimal use. Huawei has incorporated power manager in the device. It has Smart, Endurance and Normal performance modes. The settings in the power manager lets you enable or disable background data for an app. It also shows power-intensive apps so that you can close them to save power.
Our 24 hour charge rating for the Huawei Honor X1 is 18:05 hours. This means that the tablet can be used for about 18 hours and 5 minutes straight before it drains completely. So you can use it for two days easily with a single charge.
Conclusion
Overall the Huawei Honor X1 is a pretty good tablet packed with features in a compact design. It still runs on Android 4.2, which is a major problem, since Google has moved to Android 5.0. It is priced at a Rs. 19,999, which is slightly costly compared to other tablets with voice calling capabilities, but this is acceptable considering the specifications. If you are looking for a compact tablet with voice calling capabilities in a compact design, and this fits in your budget, go for it.
Pros
- Good display
- Compact design
- Brilliant battery life
Cons
- Aluminium back is prone to scratches
- Runs on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean)