IT168 Review Two years ago, whenever we encountered a powerful telecom phone, we would be very happy to say that telecom users finally had a new choice. Indeed, two years ago, the domestic mobile phone market had just entered the threshold of intelligence, and there were not many cost-effective telecom mobile phones. But times have changed, and with the deepening of the all-network strategy of chip manufacturers. More and more cost-effective machines adopt chipsets that are suitable for all networks, allowing telecom users to be on an equal footing with China Unicom and China Mobile when choosing flagship models. However, due to the high price of Netcom chipsets, which are generally above 1,500 yuan, telecommunications users still have few choices in the very popular smart phone market of less than 1,000 yuan. With the official commercialization of Telecom's 4G, the market for Telecom's 4G smartphones priced below 1,000 yuan can even be considered a blank slate. There are only a few models, and the price-performance ratio cannot be compared with mobile 4G phones worth 1,000 yuan. The Huawei Honor Play 4 mobile phone we reviewed today is officially aimed at this market. Through the evaluation, let’s see if this phone can dominate the telecommunications 4G market under a thousand yuan, and whether it can single-handedly raise the cost-performance curve of 4G telecommunications phones in this price range.
"Hardware configuration
We mentioned earlier that the market for 4G mobile phones worth 1,000 yuan is basically blank at present. The blank does not mean that there is none. Open JD.com and search for 4G telecom mobile phones worth 1,000 yuan. We You can still see many models from manufacturers such as ZTE, Coolpad, and TCL. However, the hardware configuration is not high-performance. In the first part of the review article, we will take a look at the hardware configuration of Huawei Honor Play 4. High cost performance
"Main parameters of Huawei Honor Play 4
Operating system
EMUI2.3 system is deeply customized based on Android 4.4
Network format
Card 1: Telecom 4G/3G/2G Card 2: China Unicom 2G
Body size
142.95mm x 72mm x 8.5mm< /p>
Weight
160g (heavy)
Screen
5-inch 1280*720 resolution non-fully bonded screen
< p>Camera8-megapixel Sony/OV back-illuminated camera
Processor
Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core 64-bit 1.2GHz processor
p>Body memory
RAM: 1GB ROM: 8GB (supports expansion)
Features
NFC entry communication chip
Battery
2000mAh (not replaceable)
Body color
Black
Listing price
"799 yuan (
Click to make an appointment to purchase
)
Through the hardware parameter table, we can see that this time Huawei Honor Play 4 is equipped with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm 64-bit Snapdragon 410 processor, which also makes Huawei Honor Play 4 the second commercial mobile phone to use this processor after HTC Desire 510. This processor uses ARM's new A53. Price, what is the performance of this processor? We will explain it in detail later in our review article. In other aspects, it has a 5-inch 720P screen, 1GB running memory, 8GB body storage space, 8-megapixel camera, 2000mAh battery, and supports dual-camera. SIM card dual standby means that this machine can be used as a main model in daily use.
"Appearance industrial design
If you don't say it, you may not notice it. It is currently sold. The more popular Redmi mobile phone, Huawei Honor 3c, Coolpad Master and other models all adopt quite satisfactory shapes in appearance, and even the shapes are relatively similar. In fact, this kind of "design without design" can bring several benefits: No one will find the appearance very ugly, and there is no need to use a lot of design power to design the mobile phone. Moreover, this design will not cause any process problems. In a word, the current design of thousand-yuan smartphones is to satisfy the aesthetics of most users without increasing the burden on production capacity. But if you want to stand out among thousands of smartphones, then a good appearance design is the best selling point of the product.
All in all, it is currently relatively easy to build a cost-effective smartphone worth 1,000 yuan, but how to make users feel that it is worth buying, industrial design is an important part of it. In this part of the review article, we will take a look at whether the appearance design of Huawei Honor Play 4 can impress you.
On the front, Huawei Honor Play 4 adopts a rounded rectangular design. The design of rounded rectangle is increasingly being used in the field of mobile phone appearance design. The rounded arc has become a good design language in the hands of designers. For example, if the rounded corners are large, the appearance will look more fashionable, while if the rounded corners are smaller, the overall look will be more serious. This time, Huawei Honor Play 4 adopts a rounded rectangular design language with smaller arcs. The whole machine looks relatively solid.
On the top of the front, a 2-megapixel front camera is used, and it is equipped with a light and distance sensor. This hardware indicator is quite satisfactory among thousand-yuan smartphones. Compared with Redmi The 1.6 million pixels of the 1S still have certain advantages. Huawei Honor Play 4 is equipped with the same 5-inch 1280*720 resolution screen as Huawei Honor 3c, with a pixel density of more than 290ppi, basically reaching the level of a Retina screen. However, compared with the fully laminated screen of Honor 3c, Huawei Honor Play 4 uses a non-fully laminated screen this time. In fact, the use of non-fully laminated screen is mainly due to two considerations. The first point is the cost issue. For a For mobile phones that cost thousands of yuan and support 4G, manufacturers are still very sensitive to cost. The second point is that considering the safety issues of the fully bonded screen, the warranty cost after the screen is broken is too high.
At the bottom of the fuselage, Huawei Honor Play 4 is equipped with three virtual buttons from left to right: Back, HOME, and Menu. Like the Huawei Honor 3c, the Play Edition is not equipped with a keyboard backlight. This is a bit of a pity. But overall, the length of the two areas of the top and bottom virtual buttons is smaller, which also makes the front screen of the whole machine larger. Although it is not as good as the ultra-narrow bezel and ultra-high screen ratio of flagship phones, it is still in the thousand-yuan range. Among mobile phones, the front screen-to-body ratio is considered large enough.
The back of the fuselage is a small highlight of Huawei Honor Play 4. It is made of polycarbonate and has a leather-like effect. Compared with the glossy surface of the previous Huawei Honor 3c, this design It feels better in the hand and is less likely to retain fingerprints. Huawei officials say that this design allows users to touch the phone and feel like lambskin.
The top of the back of the fuselage is equipped with an 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera and a single LED flash. The top of the camera is equipped with a noise reduction microphone. As for the quality of this camera, we will explain it in detail later in our review article.
The bottom of the fuselage is equipped with an external speaker. After the author tried it, the volume was enough to ensure that there would be no missed calls. And a small bump was thoughtfully made with a plastic grille on the speaker dust-proof net, so as to ensure that the external speaker is not blocked when the phone is placed on a flat surface such as a table.
The side of the fuselage is equipped with integrated volume buttons and power button. It does not adopt the large button design of the previous Honor 3c series products. And I guess the pot slices have also been replaced. The hand feel is better than that of Huawei Honor 3c series products, and it does not feel too soft.
The top and bottom of the fuselage are equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microUSB data cable charging interface. Same as Honor 3c.
The phone uses a 2000mAh non-removable battery design, and the battery compartment is shielded by a metal shield, which puts a layer of iron vest on the battery, so that even if the phone encounters external force, there will be no danger. It is also equipped with dual microSIM card slots, supporting microSD cards up to 32GB to expand the body’s storage space. On the top and bottom of the fuselage, due to its support for 4G networks, we can see that Huawei Honor Play 4 uses a larger area antenna design to ensure good signals.
In terms of overall appearance design, Huawei Honor Play 4 does not adopt too many radical design languages. Instead, it adopts smaller rounded corners, a larger screen-to-body ratio and a leather-like back cover. Create a mobile phone with solid workmanship and a design style that is more business-oriented. By the way, the whole machine weighs 160 grams, which is not considered thin and light among 5-inch mobile phones. But for users who are looking for a thick feel, this weight is just right.
"How is the performance of the 64-bit processor?
As we mentioned earlier, this time Huawei Honor Play 4 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core 64-bit 1.2GHz processor. And with The baseband chip can support CAT 4 LTE networks, with download speeds up to 150Mbps. What is the performance of this processor? Let’s take a look at this part of the review article
▲. Performance Analysis of Snapdragon 64-bit Processor
From the model of Snapdragon 410, we can see that this processor is a follow-up model of the Snapdragon 400 series of chips, while the Snapdragon 400 series of processors It uses the ARM A7 architecture, which is mostly used in chips on current thousand-dollar smartphones. This Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor is manufactured using TSMC’s 28nm LP low-power process, with a main frequency starting from 1.2GHz. Up to 1.4GHz and supports single-channel 64bit LPDDR2/3 memory chip
▲Performance comparison
As for the GPU, compared to the previous Adreno305, this time Qualcomm Snapdragon 410. It uses the Adreno306 GPU display core, with a main frequency of 400Mhz. The biggest highlight is that this processor can be used with the MDM9X25 baseband core previously installed on Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, and supports LTE CAT4 4G network support. It also supports functions that were only available on previous high-end models, including NFC and Beidou positioning.
The A53 has the same architecture as the previous A7 and also supports dual-emission sequential execution, and the A53 is more flexible in terms of instruction parallelism, including branching. A variety of instructions, including prediction, can be issued simultaneously through two decoding paths. In order to improve the accuracy of branch prediction, A53 adopts some practices of dual-issue out-of-order execution that were previously used to replace the A9 architecture. Sequential execution, but A53 has achieved the ultimate in current sequential execution architecture. Before the performance test, let’s take a look at the performance difference between A5/A7/A9 and A53 at 1.2GHz. Next, the A53 is much faster than the A5/A7 architecture, and even completely surpasses the A9 architecture, and the power consumption of the A53 is much lower than the current mainstream A9/A15/A17. Next, we will use the benchmark software. Let’s test the performance of the Snapdragon 410 processor installed on Huawei Honor Play 4?
"AnTuTu
This software is currently the most widely used by enthusiasts Benchmark software. This software mainly tests the CPU performance and memory (RAM) performance of the mobile phone. Without further ado, here are the screenshots.
We used the new version of AnTuTu test software. In the new version of AnTuTu test software, the 2D and 3D performance tests are more accurate. The resolution of each mobile phone is different, so the new version of AnTuTu test software is more accurate. In terms of display performance, the final scores are converted into a unified resolution. Huawei Honor Play 4 scored nearly 20,000 points. Compared with the Honor 3c’s score of 17,000 points, the performance has improved by about 15%.
"Nenamark 2
Nenamark is a benchmark software that specifically targets the performance of mobile phone processor display chips. It is divided into two types, Nenamark and Nenamark2, which are respectively aimed at mid-to-low-end mobile phones and high-end mobile phones. Mobile phone. To know the true strength of Huawei Honor Play 4, we did not hesitate to run Nenamark2.
We can see from the test results that Honor Play 4 has a score of about 55FPS. There is a 10% improvement from the 50FPS of the previous Redmi phone. It seems that the GPU display core of Adreno306 is still good.
"Vellamo
Vellamo was originally a Qualcomm product. The company's internal software tests the processor's performance in web browsing. Since there was no software in the industry specifically for testing web browsing user experience at the time, Qualcomm released this software. As mobile phone processors become increasingly powerful. The 500-point mark, the 1,000-point mark and even the 2,000-point mark have all been exceeded. Next, let’s take a look at the strength of Huawei Honor Play 4 equipped with the latest Android 4.2.2 operating system in this software.
In terms of hardware performance, Huawei Honor Play 4 is currently the leader among the thousand-yuan Telecom 4G mobile phones due to its new A53 architecture. It seems that with the good performance of Huawei Honor Play 4 , a large wave of 1,000-yuan 4G mobile phones with upgraded hardware will be unveiled in the near future.
"EMUI2.3 Analysis
Emotion UI is Huawei's independent UI system that has been tested and used on Huawei Ascend D1. It has already gone through the beta version on Huawei Honor Play 4 , version 1.0, version 1.5 and version 2.0 have many major improvements. Starting from Emotion UI 2.3, the system will be updated every two weeks, and it also has a built-in super power saving mode, etc. Which areas will Emotion UI 2.3 upgrade to improve users? What about experience? This part of the article explains it in detail.
After many days of experience, we have roughly summarized the functional highlights of the new Emotion UI 2.3, so you might as well learn about it in advance.
"Added voice search contacts in the contact function;
Added super power saving mode to close power-consuming applications;
Desktop icons are automatically aligned and can be saved by shaking Make the icon align;
The application can be quickly shared, long press the icon to share through multiple methods;
Driving mode, enhanced voice interaction mode, Bluetooth call, voice wake-up;
>Native mobile phone manager, intelligent permission management, system cleaning, security scanning;
It has built-in mirror function, as well as a variety of interesting and practical programs;
Magazine lock screen.
In fact, we have also reviewed the Huawei P7 equipped with the Emotion UI 2.3 system before. Huawei Honor Play 4 retains the function of swiping up to display a shortcut menu and the function of automatically switching magazine wallpapers on the high-quality lock screen.
Entering the main interface, we can see that the rounded application icon design does not completely adopt a skeuomorphic design, but adopts a cartoon + skeuomorphic + flat design, combined with the built-in simple wallpaper , the overall style is very simple, which also surprised the author who has used many previous Huawei phones. But the author also found that the top status bar does not use a transparent transition effect. But when we come to the drop-down menu, we can still see the shadow of the previous Huawei Emotion UI 1.5. The replaceable small switches are placed in the drop-down menu, and the settings interface has roughly the same logic as the previous Emotion UI 1.5, and the style of the previous desktop It's a bit inconsistent, but I believe it will improve with iterative updates every two weeks. After all, even MIUI took three years to form a relatively fixed and unified style.
If 2000mAh is considered satisfactory for a 3G mobile phone, but for 4G mobile phones, facing the pressure of high bandwidth and large data, 2000mAh will seem a bit stressful. However, I believe that users who have used Huawei mobile phones are quite satisfied with Huawei's power-saving technology. On Emotion UI 2.3, Huawei is equipped with a super power-saving mode. In this mode, the phone will only maintain calls, text messages, emails, etc. Basic communication functions, thereby extremely extending the use time of mobile phones.
In terms of desktop style, Huawei Honor Play 4 has customized standard style and simple style, while the simple mode is specially customized for the elderly. In fact, many people buy thousand-yuan smartphones for their parents. For example, my parents like smartphones with large screens and good photos, but teaching them to use a smartphone is really tiring. This simple model is much more convenient. You can customize the screen according to the preferences of the elderly at home, while other functions that the elderly do not use are cleverly hidden. At this point, Huawei is not only very considerate, but also accurately aware of the consumer groups of Huawei Honor Play 4.
In terms of themes, Huawei Honor Play 4 also supports the online theme library function. However, we found that most of the themes in the online theme library are currently designed based on the previous Emotion UI 1.5 and do not adopt the new 2.3 style. However, we believe that with the comprehensive upgrade of Emotion UI 2.3, this problem will definitely be solved.
By trying out Emotion UI 2.3 on Huawei Honor Play 4, the author also discovered two problems. The first is that Google’s native Android 4.4 added the experimental feature ART virtual machine, and Emotion UI 2.3 removed this feature that is still experimental. . The second problem is that because Honor Play 4 version is equipped with 1GB of running memory, and when used with Emotion UI 2.3, the remaining running memory is less than 450M after startup.
Huawei was the first domestic manufacturer to make customized Android UI, but two years later, Huawei, like many other manufacturers, seems to have reached a dead end. I can’t say that Emotion UI 2.3 is not good or beautiful, but I still feel that there is something strange about it. The author concludes that most domestic mobile phone manufacturers currently work hard on the interface, but fail to achieve a high degree of unity in style at the system level and application level. For example, there are still many shadows of version 1.5 in Emotion UI 2.3. The inconsistency in style and the lack of independently optimized basic software create a strange feeling. If Xiaomi MIUI was the dominant player before, now Lao Luo has upgraded the user experience to an emotional level. It seems that Huawei still needs to work harder. Recently, Huawei EMUI 3.0 has also been launched with Huawei Mate 7. At the press conference, Huawei said that EMUI 3.0 will also be installed on small-memory mobile phones. It is still unclear whether EMUI 3.0 will eventually be installed on Huawei Honor Play 4.
"Photography + Network Test + Summary
Huawei Honor Play 4 is equipped with an 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. We mentioned the front-facing camera before On the other hand, Huawei has made a very considerate optimization, what exactly is it?
When taking a selfie, have you ever encountered a photo where the eyes seem to be looking elsewhere and not facing the camera? Feeling? In fact, this is because the former camera of the mobile phone is usually at the top of the phone, and the human eye is often looking at the screen when taking a selfie, which causes this problem, and the Emotion UI installed on Huawei Honor Play 4 2.3 adds a small picture-in-picture function to the upper right corner of the screen, which allows you to see yourself on the screen and face the front camera when taking a selfie. This humanized function has not yet been customized in other customizations. The UI is very user-friendly. However, this time Huawei Honor Play 4 is equipped with a simplified version of EMUI2.3, which does not include beauty and panoramic selfie functions.
< p>Next, let’s take a look at the strength of Huawei Honor Play 4’s 8-megapixel camera through sample photos.▲Click on the picture to see a larger image
This time Huawei. Honor Play 4 uses an 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera purchased from SONY and OV. From the sample, we can see that Huawei Honor Play 4 performs quite well under good light intensity. It does not use the current top-notch 13-megapixel stack camera, but the difference is not obvious. But in an environment with poor light intensity, the limitations of 8 million pixels become apparent. However, considering the positioning of 1,000 yuan + 4G, this is a problem. The author is quite satisfied with the camera.
▲Telecom 4G network speed test
The author also experienced the 4G network speed of Huawei Honor Play 4, basically on the Northeast Third Ring Road in Beijing. Reaching a level of above 20Mbps, if the tariff can be reduced, it can really replace the fiber broadband at home. In fact, the significance of 4G network is not only to watch videos faster, but in the near future, mobile phones will become the hub of smart devices, and more. Responsible for the functions of data transmission and integration, the advantages of 4G network will be truly highlighted, and 4G can also play an important role in other fields such as medical care.
" Article summary: < /p>
As we mentioned earlier, the current price-performance ratio of 1,000-yuan Telecom 4G mobile phones is not very high. The launch of Huawei Honor Play 4 has improved the cost-effectiveness of mobile phones in this part of the market. I believe that in the next period of time, there will be a large number of cost-effective 1,000 yuan Telecom 4G mobile phones launched, but before that, if you happen to upgrade Telecom 4G and also want to buy a 1,000 yuan phone, then Huawei Honor Play 4 will be your first choice.