Honor 70 review

Magic UI 6.1 on top of Android 12

The new Honor comes with an upgraded Magic UI 6.1 version of the company's software, which is based on Android 12. Aesthetically speaking, the software is no different from the previous versions and if you've ever used Huawei's EMUI or Honor's previous iterations of the software, you will feel right at home. Also, the software isn't any different from the Magic4 Pro's, except for a couple of missing premium features, of course. But the basics are there.

And that includes the Android 12-intrinsic features as well. You have the Privacy Dashboard, granular app permissions, a green dot indicator if an app is currently using the camera, microphone, GPS, etc. However, we didn't find notification history, which should have been around since Android 11.

Home screen, recent apps, notification shade, general settings

The OS provides quite a bit of customization options. You've got a wide selection of themes, Always-on display styles, lock screens, icons and it even lets you choose between a simple Home screen style or аpp drawer-based one.

Customizations and always-on display

Honor takes security seriously, judging by the privacy features it offers on top of Android's standard security layer. You can lock away pretty much everything you'd like - apps, folders, files, images and videos, passwords, etc. All of those can be accessed with a fingerprint. Facial recognition is limited to accessing locked apps, autofill of usernames and passwords, the Safe functionality can only be accessed using your fingerprint. That's understandable given that facial data using just the selfie camera isn't as secure and reliable as the fingerprint reader.

And as far as the fingerprint scanner is concerned, it's fast and reliable. We didn't have any issues with it, even under bright sunlight, which often interferes with optical fingerprint readers.

Honor hasn't neglected the advanced multitasking features. Swipe from the left or right edge of the display and hold to open up an app of your choice in a small, interactive window, which can be moved around, minimized or maximized. Opening more apps at once is possible, but they are moved to a separate side panel for quick access during multitasking. You can pin a lot of apps, too.

Multi-tasking features

Some under-the-hood features are provided as an extra layer on top of the already existing Android 12 optimizations. There are systems in place (which Honor calls OS Turbo X), which regularly take care of storage defragmentation and make sure the phone stays as fast as it was in the beginning.

The OS would also suspend apps in the background to free resources but still allow you to continue where you've left off when you return to the app as if it was never closed.

Unfortunately, we found the OS to be really aggressive in closing some apps in the background, thankfully messaging apps are usually spared. Still, Honor needs to do some tuning so it doesn't put off European uses. Sure, you can easily whitelist the apps you don't want to be killed by the OS, but it's an advanced feature that not every user will be up to.

Anyway, one of Magic UI's standout features is Honor Share. It can only be used with an eligible Honor MagicBook laptop and it allows you to share your phone's screen, sync some apps or even share files seamlessly. The keyboard and mouse can be used for both devices at once, the mirrored screen of the phone is optimized to work with the computer's input methods.

All in all, we liked the new Magic UI 6.0. It offers а sensible amount of customization options and it's smooth and snappy, we liked the overall experience.

There's still some work to be done, though. For example, you can't change the swipe-down gesture from the home screen to show the notification shade, and you are stuck with global search. The context menu is limited to just "Uninstall" when you tap and hold on an app icon. There is no way to quickly kill the app or clear the cache. There's no easy access to the said menus through the recent apps menu either.

The dialog needs more actions

And finally, we would really appreciate an auto brightness button or toggle in the notification shade as well as sensitivity adjustment for the navigation gestures. The aggressive curvature of the display feels like you are swiping from the edge of the display but instead of a back gesture, we found ourselves swiping left or right without initiating the back gesture itself. It's not a big deal as you can get used to it rather easily.

Synthetic performance

Honor 70 runs on an upgraded version of the Snapdragon 778G, called Snapdragon 778G+. The Plus variant has slightly higher clock speed on its main Cortex-A78 core, now ticking at 2.5 GHz but the rest of the core clusters remain unchanged - 3x Cortex-A78 @2.2 GHz and 4x Cortex-A55 @1.9 GHz. The GPU is also the Adreno 642L with no change in clock speed. And, of course, both SoCs are based on TSMC's 6nm N6 manufacturing process.

Memory-wise, the device ships with 8GB/128GB configuration as a standard but can be found in 8GB/256GB, 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB flavors. Now, without further ado, let's see what the benchmarks show.

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Poco F4 GT
  1244
• Realme GT2
  1131
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  1096
• Realme GT Neo3
  968
• Nothing Phone (1)
  820
• Honor 70
  819
• Honor 50
  787
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  785

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Realme GT Neo3
  4079
• Poco F4 GT
  3637
• Realme GT2
  3487
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  3049
• Nothing Phone (1)
  3024
• Honor 50
  2971
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  2943
• Honor 70
  2925

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• Poco F4 GT
  952124
• Realme GT Neo3
  819348
• Realme GT2
  810512
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  719696
• Nothing Phone (1)
  592789
• Honor 70
  559300
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  528905
• Honor 50
  470348

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme GT Neo3
  43
• Realme GT2
  38
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  38
• Nothing Phone (1)
  23
• Honor 70
  20
• Honor 50
  20
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  19

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2
  30
• Realme GT Neo3
  28
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  25
• Nothing Phone (1)
  16
• Honor 70
  15
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  15
• Honor 50
  14

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2
  56
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  56
• Realme GT Neo3
  53
• Nothing Phone (1)
  33
• Honor 70
  29
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  29
• Honor 50
  27

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• Realme GT2
  68
• Realme GT Neo3
  60
• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G
  57
• Nothing Phone (1)
  37
• Honor 70
  35
• Honor 50
  33
• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  33

3DMark SSE Vulkan 1.0 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi 12 Lite
  4610
• Honor 70
  4469
• Nothing Phone (1)
  4336
• Honor 50
  4071

The results from the benchmarks show adequate utilization of the Snapdragon 778G+. It has slightly better single-core performance compared to the non-Plus variant of the chipset due to the main core's higher clock speed. In the rest of the tests, the difference between the two chips is mostly statistical deviation. However, when put against similarly priced phones, the Honor 70 is no match when it comes to raw performance. There are quite a few options with Snapdragon 888, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or even Dimensity 8100.

Sustained performance

The Honor 70 doesn't boast any fancy cooling solutions but the Snapdragon 778G+ isn't a very demanding chipset to begin with. There is, however, a software solution that's supposed to optimize gaming and provide smooth performance. It's one of the many Turbo X features aimed at improving the overall gaming experience.

This test, though, isn't a gaming one as it simulates 100% CPU load for an hour. So it's not a good representation of the Turbo X optimizations.

In the first half of the test, the CPU maintained pretty much the maximum of its theoretical performance. But after 20 minutes or so, sudden and short drops to about 20% of CPU's clock speeds started happening.

CPU throttle test: 30 min • 60 min

And until the end of the test, the CPU throttled a bit too much and quite often. This is definitely not ideal since sudden drops in performance mean potential frame rate drops during gaming. A better scenario would have been to maintain more conservative, but stable clock speeds at around 80 or even 70%.