Huawei recently brought the new Huawei Nova 3i along with the Nova 3 in India. Huawei Nova 3i is the newest mid-range smartphone by the company which features 6.3-inch Full HD+, 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage. The smartphone also features iconic Dual camera setup on both front and back. Let’s see how the smartphone performs in our review period.
Design and Build:
The Huawei Nova 3i looks almost the same as the Nova 3. The only difference is the back panel here lacks the reflective glass back which we’ve seen on the high-end Huawei smartphones. Huawei Nova 3i features also have the dual camera setup, Huawei logo, and small camera placed at the same position.
On the front, it has the notch at the top which also has dual camera setup as the front. The volume rocker keys and power button are placed on the right side of the edge. While the SIM card tray is stapled on the left side of the edge. The 3.5mm Aux port, Single Speaker Grill and micro USB port, all are placed the bottom side of the edge while the top part only has a microphone.
The Huawei Nova 3i is sturdy and simple. It looks elegant despite the absence of reflective glass back. Also the size and weight of the device hand which makes it easy to use.
Display:
Huawei Nova 3i features a 6.3-inch Full HD+ LCD 2.5D curved glass display with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels, 19:5:9 aspect ratio with a notch and a screen-to-body ratio of about 82%. The display is bright, delivers good color due to 85% NTSC color gamut. It also has good viewing angles and the sunlight readability is impressive. Users also hot the option to change the resolution, hide the notch and option to enable full-screen display.
Hardware and Software:
The smartphone is powered by Huawei’s own Octa-Core 12nm Kirin 710 processor with Mali-G51 MP4 GPU and AI photo features under the hood. The SoC is supported by 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage which can be expandable up to 256GB. The connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 LE and GPS. It’s a dual SIM smartphone which offers 4G LTE on both the SIM.
On the software section, it runs on Android 8.1 oreo based EMUI 8.2 on the top of it. The UI is easy to use and offers several customizations to the users. You can choose between Standard Drawer option for your home screen. EMUI also offers several gestures and navigation option to change your internal looks.
So out of the 128GB storage, you get almost 113GB of free storage. These are few bloatwares on the smartphone which takes the additional space along with UI settings. And out of 4GB RAM, we got nearby 2GB is free on boot when default apps are running in the background.
Performance:
The Huawei Nova 3i accompanied with 4GB RAM and Kirin 710 SoC is fast and powerful. The touch response was very smooth and impressive. The multitasking ability is also good. As we tried to swipe between several games and there was no lag on them.
We also played high-end games like PUBG, Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5 on it. There was no lag or any kind of drop on it. The only drawback was a bit of a temperature rise as the gameplay time increases.
The benchmark score was also very competitive under 20K range. Huawei Nova 3i scored 138232 on AnTuTu and 1579/5497 on Geekbench Single Core/Multi-Core which is good. The scored points are one of the best under this range of smartphones.
The 4G LTE connectivity on this smartphone works great, we used Jio 4G on primary SIM and Airtel 4G on the other. And we rarely find any type network or call drop issue. Also, the other connectivity options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth also worked fine on this device.
For the security purpose, Huawei provided us Face Unlock and Fingerprint sensor. Both the feature works fine and completes one another. If the room is too dark, use Fingerprint otherwise Face Unlock opens up the smartphone quickly.
The Audio and Video quality of the smartphone is also good. It comes with Huawei Histen sound effects as well as an equalizer which creates an effective output for the users. The video quality is good though with the FHD+ display.
Camera:
The Huawei Nova 3i features a 16-megapixel primary rear camera with 5P lens and f/2.2, PDAF along with a 2-megapixel secondary camera with f/2.2 for portrait shots, similar to the Huawei P20 Lite. The dual camera on the front captures great images under daylight. The camera is fast but sometimes struggles to focus. The HDR images are good but could have been better.
The front primary camera is 24MP camera with 1.0 μm pixel size, f/2.0 aperture and a 78 degree wide-angle lens along with a 2MP secondary camera with f/2.0 aperture for portrait shot. It also captures great images with daylight and low light conditions. The selfies have good color tone and in-depth details.
The UI of the camera is good and it offers features like Aperture, Portrait, AR lens that also comes with 3D animoji that can animate your facial expressions. There are several other modes like Pro photo, Pro Video, Slow-mo, Night, Panorama, Light painting, HDR, Time-lapse, Filter, 3D panorama, Watermark, Document scan and Artist mode.
It also has AI capability which can scan the images and select the modes automatically from Flower, Ancient building, Group Photo, Food, Panda, Beach, Snow, Waterfall, Text, Portrait, Night, Sunrise, Sunset, Blue sky, Plant, Fireworks, Autumn leaves, Overcast, Auto, Bike, Cat, Dog and more.
The camera can also shoot 1080p videos with 30fps. Apart from it, there’s also 16x Super Slow Motion mode offering 480 frames per second video recording. It also has Automatic Motion Detection, which allows users to capture any fleeting moment easily. The video quality is good along with the audio integration.
Battery:
The Huawei Nova3i features a 3340mAh of battery and thanks to the optimization, it lasts for the whole day even with heavy use. Minimal users will get more than 2 days of life with a full charge. It also offers power saving mode and ultra-power saving mode to increase the battery life. The charging time is 3-4 hours as it lacks the fast charge support.
Gizmo Verdict
Huawei Nova 3i is a good smartphone if you consider the specification and performance. The price point of 20,990 is good though there are betters smartphones available under this range. Honor Play and Poco F1 is offering more if you need a better performance smartphone.
