Much of the Same
Moving away from its high-end devices, Huawei has recently released its latest mid-range smartphone, the Huawei nova 2 Plus. Design-wise, the nova 2 Plus borrows elements from the honor 8 Pro as well as the P10. The metallic unibody comes with a matte finish, making it great to have in your hands while the indent of the fingerprint sensor at the rear a lot shallower compared to other devices. There’s also very little Huawei branding aside from its logo located at the rear of the device at the bottom.
A Bit of Everything
While the P10 boasted dual Leica cameras and the honor 8 Pro focused on mobile gaming, the nova 2 Plus is just your everyday mid-range smartphone. Not necessarily a good or bad thing, the nova 2 Plus stands out by not standing out (if that makes any sense.) With no outstanding features, that also implies that it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, which is what many consumers are looking at. You also get 128GB of internal storage space, making a microSD card useless.
Great for Everyone
Using the nova 2 Plus daily brought out a great experience overall. The Kirin 659 processor had a quick step to it without any sort of delay and lag, partially thanks to the 4GB of RAM. The EMUI 5.1 OS was modelled after Android Nougat 7.0 and contained very minimal bloatware, which was a nice touch. Multitasking between day-to-day social media stalking activities like Facebook and Instagram soaked up very little of the 3,340mAh battery capacity and even when streaming videos, it still holds itself up well. Like other smartphones, it heats up rather quickly when watching videos or using the camera for long periods.
Speaking of the Camera…
Selling itself – that came out wrong – as Huawei’s best selfie smartphone, the nova 2 Plus comes with a 20-megapixel front-facing shooter. It’s dual rear cameras carry a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens alongside the 8-megapixel long-focus lens with f/1.8. For the sake of your eyes and the review, I will keep all selfies out of it. With or without the skin enhancement features, the front-facing camera made me look way too translucent and pale (I looked like a badly rendered version of IT.)
A Formidable Shooter
At RM1,999, you can’t expect greatness. For that price, the rear cameras are more than capable at keeping the Likes flowing in on your Instagram. Colours reproduction is adequate with sufficient lighting although the pictures captured were in the middle of the night. You can also adjust the level of bokeh in real-time, taking you one step closer to being an ‘influencer’.
Verdict:
The Huawei nova 2 Plus is a great everyday smartphone if you’re looking something that is somewhat affordable and doesn’t die on you easily.
