DESIGN
The Huawei Nova 3e has a glass back, a metal frame surrounding it, with of course, a notch on the front and a rear camera placed vertically. The fingerprint scanner (which is super fast by the way) is placed on the back in a comfortable position, and far from the vertical camera, reducing the accidental smudging that occurs on some other devices when trying to unlock the phone.
Once you pick up the nova 3e, you’ll instantly feel that’s it’s a well-built phone, with good looks.The phone comes in Midnight Black and Klein Blue in the UAE.
In terms of size, the Huawei nova 3e is very close to the Samsung Galaxy S9, and is fairly light in weight, at 145g. On the bottom, you’ll find a USB-C charging port, the speakers, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is becoming rare these days.
The Huawei nova 3e supports dual SIM cards or one nano-SIM and a microSD card up to 256GB.
SCREEN
the Nova 3e rocks a 5.84in LCD screen with a Full HD+ resolution of 2280 x 1080, which reproduces some nice colors. Photos and videos are sharp and pop! Impressive for a mid-tier phone.
For this one, Huawei decided to take a different approach when holding the phone in landscape mode. The notch merges with a black bar, eliminating it being visible through pictures or videos. In portrait mode, the situation is different, where some apps like Chrome are perfectly aligned under the notch, others, such as the setting page still have the notch overlayed on top. Google says Android P, which is coming later this year, will address these situations.
CAMERA
The Huawei nova 3e has a dual-lens camera, with a 16MP sensor featuring an f/2.0 aperture with a pixel size of 1.12 μm, and a secondary camera with a 2MP f/2.2 sensor. On the front, the Nova 3e’s notch houses a 16MP front-facing camera with a 78-degree field of view. Unlike the premium models, the Nova 3e doesn’t get the Leica branding on its cameras.
The daylight photos snapped were great, for a phone at this price point. Photos are sharp and with a good level of detail and color reproduction.
When we tested the phone in a darker environments, the camera didn’t perform as good, but did a good job for device at this price point.
On the front side, we found the selfies to be a bit over exposed, but as can overall performance, its pretty good. Both the rear and front cameras also adopts the a new beauty option which uses 3D facial recognition technology to enhance your features, like skin smoothening and other effects.
PERFORMANCE
Internally, the Nova 3e rocks an octa-core Kirin 659 chipset with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage perfectly capable of handling the standard tasks and Android 8.0 without issues, of course don’t expect it to handle gaming in the same manner, it’s not made for this category anyway.
In addition to the fingerprint sensor, the facial recognition technology is super-fast and unlocks the device in a fraction of a second.
The phone’s 3000 mAh battery lasts a full day under normal usage while mostly connected to Wifi while doing the occasional calls, emails, browsing and a bit of Youtube. The device supports fast charging.
The Nova 3e is overlayed with EMUI 8.0, Huawei’s Android skin. Huawei claims that EMUI 8.0 can now predict behavior and and adapts to the user’s usage through intelligent resource allocation. Huawei also said that EMUI 8.0 is designed to optimise speed and performance as your device gets older.
PRICINING
The Huawei Nova 3e is now available in the UAE for AED 1,199 thorough major retailers, and can be bought online from noon here or from Souq here.
