Huawei Nova 5T

amazon Huawei Nova 5T reviews

Huawei’s ‘Nova’ brand has always been of interest to users because it is a product line that the company prioritizes to test new things and target young people who love technology. Still have a price located in the ‘affordable’ level, not too high-end like the P and Mate series.

The latest generation of this line is Nova 5, with Huawei Nova 5T version. Is it worth buying like previous versions? We will find out together through this article.

Just holding it in hand, surely everyone has to admit that Nova 5T is very shiny, especially with the dark purple version that I have here. With the latest version of Nova, the company designed its logo, and it appears everywhere! The entire back is this logo printed repeatedly, forming a unique pattern that I have never seen in another smartphone on the market.

The company is so proud of this logo that it created an animated wallpaper for it, which can change colors very strangely when we put the device in different directions, like a real-life object interacting with the sun. This design is very eye-catching and will be suitable for young people – the audience that Huawei is aiming for, but will also be a bit too much’ for middle-aged people or have a simpler style.

Flipping the device again, we find four cameras, including a 16MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera with a 117-degree field of view, a 48MP f/1.8 main camera, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 2MP macro camera is quite popular with Chinese firms in recent times.

The machine is not equipped with a camera specialized for zooming far, but with the high-resolution main sensor, the company is also “confident” for users to zoom up to 10x, so we have a fairly wide focal range of 0.5x to 0.5x. 10x. The highest zoom level that I think is ‘sharp enough to post the web’ is below 5x; only when necessary should you zoom in more because this is only an electronic zoom.

The macro camera is also worth mentioning when it gives us a focusing distance of only 4cm to get closer to small objects to capture specific images. Macro cameras will generally have poorer quality than the main camera (lower resolution, poorer light processing, no autofocus), but they will also produce great photos strong impressions in specific cases.

The point that 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, making the images different. Even with one camera, the device often measures the wrong color, so the images are very cold.

In contrast, thanks to being equipped with good quality sensors, the Nova 5T’s images can be corrected quite ‘heavy.’ If the image has the wrong color, we can convert it back to the right, if the image has parts that are too dark, we can brighten it up to a certain level.

Nova 5T is not a smartphone with an ‘instant camera system, but for those who have a little knowledge of post-production to get the highest quality. But most people now take-and-post, so maybe the company should update the algorithm for this model and its other smartphones.

Back to the external design, the device uses a capacitive fingerprint sensor placed on the side.

This type of sensor is not as ‘modern’ as the one placed under the screen applied by some other companies to their smartphones but has a very fast opening speed; just a light press is enough to enter the user interface. Sometimes, when I take the device out of my pocket, my hand accidentally touches the sensor, and the device is already open!

One of the reasons the company cannot use the fingerprint sensor under the screen is that the Nova 5T uses an LCD screen. The device has a 6.26-inch panel (quite small and fits in hand), FullHD + resolution with a small dot on the left side to make a difference with Samsung.

This dot is as small as possible, just surrounding the lens of the 32MP selfie camera, not taking up any other display part. The edges of the device due to the use of LCD panels, so it cannot be ‘thin’ like those with AMOLED panels, but can still be called ‘not thick,’ along with being uniform on all edges, should create a sense of balance.

Of course, using an LCD screen also comes with some weaknesses compared to high-end models with AMOLED, including not as high contrast because the pixels can’t turn off by themselves (which means no HDR), the color is somewhat lighter. When first taken out of the box, the screen also turns a lot blue (similar to the camera system); fortunately, it can be adjusted in the preferences.

Unlike the previous ‘young people’ lines that often focused too much on design and ‘forgotten’ the configuration, the Nova 5T is very much noticed by the company in this regard. The device is equipped with a Kirin 980 processor (7 nm) and 8GB of RAM, the Mate 20, and the P30 Pro configuration.

where can you get a Huawei Nova 5T online

Huawei Nova 5T YAL-L21 128GB 6GB RAM International Version – Crush Blue: Buy it now

HUAWEI Nova 5T (128GB, 6GB) 6.26″ LCD, Kirin 980, 48MP Quad Camera, 22.5W Fast Charge, Dual SIM GSM Unlocked Global 4G LTE International EU Plug with US Adapter (Purple): Buy it now

That is no longer the highest configuration on the market when Snapdragon 855 and Kirin 990 have been launched and have a much higher score than Kirin 980. The Kirin 980 is also inferior to the chip from Qualcomm in terms of GPU performance, which is most evident in the 3DMark review. That is not too important for me when the heaviest game I play is Arena of valor can still comfortably run at the highest level at 60fps; on the contrary, anyone with heavier jobs will be able to see a difference.

Powering all the above configurations is a 3750mAh battery. That is a compact machine that fits in the palm of your hand, so the company can’t ‘insert’ a larger capacity battery. But like other Huawei models, the background tasks of the device are extremely tightly controlled, so the actual usage time of the Nova 5T is very good, up to 11 hours and 17 minutes according to the Work 2.0 review.

Huawei Nova 5T charging process from battery exhaustion (0%):

– 15 minutes charge 23%

– 30 minutes of 48% charge (about 2% less than advertised, not too much)

– 1-hour charge 86%

– 1 hour 20 minutes to fully charge the battery

The device is also equipped with fast charging (22.5W); according to its advertisement, it can charge half the battery in 30 minutes. This number is not too much different in actual testing, and after about 1 hour 20 minutes (80 minutes), the battery is full.

The device is using Android 9 with Huawei’s familiar EMUI 9.1 interface. As evaluated many times before (in the whole article about the P30 Pro), this set of interfaces currently looks quite outdated because many colors make users feel ‘troubled’ than the interfaces from the other company.

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

The newly launched Huawei Mate 30 Pro has a new EMUI 10 interface; it is ‘cleaner,’ neater, and less colorful than the current EMUI 9 version. Hopefully, shortly Nova 5T will also be updated to have EMUI 10, catching up with the interface design trends of other brands.

And you can rest assured that the Nova 5T is still ‘safe,’ using all applications such as Gmail, Youtube, Play Store …

Epilogue

As usual, Nova 5T shows Huawei’s strengths through 3 points: unique and fancy design; powerful and highly configurable camera system using ‘home grown’ processor. In contrast, the device also comes with Huawei’s weaknesses, such as colorful interface, heterogeneity in image processing.

If you just read the configuration and look at the price, then indeed Nova 5T is one of the most worth buying machines at the price range of less than $450, with a long list of ‘wonderful’ configurations. But whether it is ‘worth buying’ or not depends on the configurations seen on paper, but on whether the user can ignore the weaknesses listed above or not!