Huawei Ascend P7 review: Looking strong

The image gallery includes a great editor

The Ascend P7's gallery app hasn't seen much change since the Jelly Bean version. As there is no dedicated video player, it's also used to play videos. It defaults to the standard Album view, where you see all of your media divided by albums. Video files are signified by a special icon.

Opening a single image lets you quickly delete or rotate it, as well as gives you some basic sharing options (including streaming it over DLNA).

The Gallery app • Viewing an image gives you simple sharing options

You can also go into a more capable editor, which is one of the most full-featured we've seen. Huawei did a great job including light and exposure adjustments (so you can bring out the shadows or the highlights), effects, color styles, red eye correction, straightening a photo, sharpening and face glow (which detects faces automatically). You can also write on images, add borders, and even adjust advanced photo manipulation settings like curves for individual color channels.

The image editor is one of the more capable we've seen

When it came to playing videos, the codec support was a mixed bag. On the upside you get DivX, MKV and FullHD support, as well as MOV files (a rarity for Android devices), but on the downside video files with AC3 audio refused to play, and we also had issues with WMV files.

Subtitle support was also iffy, as foreign language subtitles showed odd characters, and you couldn't choose from a selection of subtitles to play if you had more than one - it just launched the first subtitle file it came across in the same directory as the movie.

Otherwise, all you really get in terms of options is play/pause and a slider to scrub through the video.

The video player offers poor subtitle support

Music player with Dolby Mobile

The Huawei Ascend P7 comes with Huawei's custom music player app we saw for the first time on the Ascend P6. It offers four default playlists dedicated to your mood, but you'll have to assign songs to the mood playlists manually. There are also All songs, Playlists, Albums, Artist and Folders views.

Browsing the music library

The Now Playing screen is pretty standard, it offers album art and lyrics, and quick shortcuts to add a particular song to one of your mood playlists. You can toggle Dolby Mobile by tapping the icon on the top right, but there are no additional equalizer presets or custom equalizer settings.

The now playing interface has simple and extended views

Playing a song results in quick controls on the lockscreen and in the notification area.

Music controls on the lockscreen and notification area

FM radio

The Huawei Ascend P7 has a built-in FM receiver. It can play through the headset or the loudspeaker, but you'll need to have the headset plugged in as it serves as an antenna. We were disappointed not to find RDS support - you'll have to name your radio stations by hand.

The FM Radio also has a notification area shortcut

Great audio quality, let down by stereo crosstalk

The Huawei Ascend P7 absolutely aced the first part of our audio quality test. It got an excellent score in every part and got decently high volume levels for a great overall performance.

And, for the most part, things remain just as impressive when you plug in a pair of headphones. The frequency response is spot on, the noise level and dynamic range are great and there is no distortion to speak of. Yet there's an increase in stereo crosstalk that's too big to ignore and that prevents us from giving the Ascend P7 full marks here. Had it not been for that, the P7 would have been among the best in business, but as things stand now, it's yet another good-to-very-good music player.

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.