Detailed review of Huawei Nova 5T: Young design, high configuration, worth buying?

Huawei’s ‘Nova’ brand has always been of interest to users, because it is a product line that is preferred by the company to try new things and target young people who love technology, but still have a price. ‘affordable’ level, not so high-end as the P and Mate series.

The latest generation of this series is the Nova 5, with the Vietnamese version of Huawei Nova 5T is worth buying like the previous versions, especially in the situation of Huawei’s very mess ” in the US war. – Is it as good as it is today? We will learn through this article.

Just holding it, everyone must recognize that the Nova 5T is very sleek, especially with the dark purple version that I have here. With the latest version of Nova, the company designed its own logo and it appeared everywhere! The entire back is this logo printed over and over, creating a unique pattern that I’ve never seen in any other smartphone on the market.

The back is sleek and youthful

The company is so proud of this logo that it created a dynamic wallpaper for it, capable of strange color changes when we put the device in different directions, like a real-life object interacting with the sun. so. This design is very eye-catching, and will suit young people – the object that Huawei targets, but will also be ‘too much’ for middle-aged people or have a simpler style.

Wallpaper changes the color of the rainbow when it is tilted

Turning the camera on again, we found 4 cameras including a 16MP f / 2.2 ultra wide camera with 117-degree viewing angle, a 48MP f / 1.8 main camera, a 2MP sensor for depth measurement, and a 2MP macro camera. , has been quite popular with Chinese brands recently.

It does not have a dedicated camera for long zooming, but with a high-resolution main sensor, the company is also ‘confident’ for users to zoom up to 10x, so we have a fairly wide focal range from 0.5x to 10x. Using in fact, the highest zoom that I think ‘enough sharpness to post web’ is below the 5x level, only when you need the crew you should zoom larger because this is just electronic zoom only.

Switch between the focal lengths of the device

Macro cameras are also worth mentioning, given the 4cm focusing distance to get closer to small objects to capture the detailed photos. Macro cameras will generally be of inferior quality to the main camera (lower resolution, less bright handling, no autofocus), but with specific cases it will also produce images. shape makes a strong impression.

Compare the close-up capabilities of the main camera and macro camera

The point I feel dissatisfied with this camera system (and most other Huawei devices) lies in the unevenness. When switching between cameras, the color temperature and contrast are often changed, causing the images to be different. Even with one camera, the device often measures the wrong color, so the pictures are very cold, have to be adjusted as follows:

Photos of Nova 5T sometimes suffer from the wrong color temperature, requiring corrections

In contrast, thanks to the equipped with good quality sensors, the image of Nova 5T can fix quite ‘heavy hands’. If the image is in the wrong color, we can switch it back to the right, if the image has too dark parts, we can push the light to a certain extent.

The Nova 5T is not a smartphone with ‘instant noodles’ camera system, but for those who have a bit of post-production knowledge to get the highest quality. But most people are taking screenshots now, so perhaps the company should update the algorithm for this model, as well as its other smartphones.

The post-production ability of Nova 5T’s bright range (DR) is quite good, we see the details in the dark area

A few pictures taken from Huawei Nova 5T:

Returning to the exterior design, the device uses a capacitive fingerprint sensor placed on the side.

This type of sensor is not ‘modern’ as the type that is placed under the screen used by some other manufacturers on its smartphones, but has a very fast opening speed, just a light press has entered the user interface. Sometimes even taking the phone out of the bag, I accidentally touched the sensor and the device was turned on!

Fingerprint sensor for very fast opening speed, almost instant

One of the reasons it can’t use an in-display fingerprint sensor is that the Nova 5T uses an LCD screen. It has a 6.26-inch panel (quite small and small), FullHD + resolution with a small dot on the left to make a difference with Samsung (placed on the right with the S10 and in the middle with the Note 10) .

The dot is as small as possible, just surrounding the lens of the 32MP selfie camera, without taking up any other display. The edges of the device using LCD panels should not be as ‘sticky’ as those with AMOLED panels, but can still be called ‘not thick’, accompanied by evenly at all edges. should create a sense of balance.

Of course, the use of LCD screens also comes with some weaknesses compared to high-end AMOLED models, including not as high contrast as the pixel cannot be turned off automatically (followed by no HDR. ), colors are somewhat lighter. When I first took it out of the box, the screen also turned a lot blue (similar to the shooting system), but thankfully, it was adjustable in the option.

Evaluating Kirin 980 processor performance

Unlike the previous ‘young people-oriented’ lines that usually focus too much on the design and ‘forget’ the configuration, the Nova 5T is very noticeable by the company on this issue. It is equipped with Kirin 980 processor (7 nm) and 8GB of RAM, which is already configured on Mate 20 and P30 Pro.

To be fair, this is no longer the highest configuration on the market, when the Snapdragon 855 and Kirin 990 were launched and got a lot higher points than the Kirin 980. The Kirin 980 is also inferior to Qualcomm’s chip in terms of GPU performance, which is most evident in the 3DMark review. This is not too important for me, when the heaviest game I play is the Union Garena can still comfortably run at the highest level at 60fps, otherwise anyone who has heavier jobs will be able to see. difference.

Currently, the number of devices using Snapdragon 855 at a price of less than 10 million VND is not much but it is not nonexistent, usually those of Redmi and Xiaomi (namely Redmi K20 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 9). So although the configuration of Nova 5T can be considered ‘high’, it is not the highest in the price range.

Assess the battery life of the device by Post Work 2.0

Powering all the above configurations is a 3750mAh battery. This is a compact machine, held in the palm of the hand so the company can not ‘tuck’ a larger capacity battery anymore. But like other Huawei models, the underground tasks are strictly controlled, so the actual usage time of Nova 5T is very good, up to 11 hours 17 minutes according to the Work 2.0 assessment.

The device is also equipped with fast charging capability (22.5W), according to the company’s ad, it can charge half of the battery in 30 minutes. In actual testing, this number is not too much difference, and after about 1 hour 20 minutes (80 minutes), the device is full of battery.

It uses Android 9 with Huawei’s familiar EMUI 9.1 interface. As reviewed many times before (in the whole post about the P30 Pro ), the interface now looks quite outdated because there are many colors, many factors make users feel ‘confused’ than the interface from the company. other.

On Nova 5T also does not have a feature that I like: System-wide black mode (Dark mode) like on the P30 Pro. Perhaps it only equipped this feature on models with AMOLED screens, but even LCD monitors that do not have the advantage of saving battery power, using dark mode also makes the interface easier on the eyes, easier to see when it is dark. !

EMUI 9.1 interface

The newly launched Huawei Mate 30 Pro has a new EMUI 10 interface, and according to foreign news sites, it is ‘clean’, tidy and less colorful than the current EMUI 9 version. . Hopefully in the near future Nova 5T will also be updated to have EMUI 10, to keep pace with the trend of interface design of other brands.

Referring to the Mate 30 Pro, we will also have to mention Huawei is embargoed by the US, not to use Google services. Currently, the Nova 5T is still a ‘safe’, still able to use all applications such as Gmail, Youtube, Play Store … But whether this device will receive enough Android upgrades (including upgrades security is small) is still a big question mark.

Buying a smartphone today is probably not just buying hardware to use, but also buying a comprehensive software experience (interface, apps, future updates), so we will have to consider A little bit more carefully when choosing to buy Huawei products during this time, including Nova 5T. Is the situation better in the future? That no one knows for sure.

Epilogue

As usual, Nova 5T shows Huawei’s strengths through 3 points: unique and fancy design; Powerful and highly configurable camera systems using ‘growable’ microprocessors. In contrast, the machine also comes with Huawei’s ‘inherent’ weaknesses such as the colorful interface, the heterogeneity in image processing. That’s not to mention the ‘quite uncertain future’ in software updates when Huawei’s sanctions situation is still unresolved.

If only read the configuration and look at the price, the Nova 5T is indeed one of the most worthy devices at the price of less than 10 million, with a long list of ‘terrible’ configurations. But whether it is ‘worth buying’ or not depends not on the configuration seen on paper, but on whether the user can ignore the weaknesses listed above or not!