Hotwav Cyber 17 Review: specs and features, camera quality test, gaming benchmark, user opinions and photos

HOTWAV Cyber ​​17 - Excessive Savings

Unfortunately, the Chinese company HOTWAV has failed to establish itself as a leader in dust- and water-resistant smartphones. Several truly successful and well-balanced models have been paired with rather mediocre phones with obvious flaws. Today's review subject falls close to the latter category, although it's clear why the developer chose it this way. The desire to save money backfired.

The new device's appearance looks archaic. While the rubberized case colors are pleasing to the eye, it features a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, a trendy camping flashlight, and an interesting camera module, all of this pales in comparison to the enormous screen bezels, the 16-megapixel selfie camera's design, which is five to ten years out of date, and the considerable thickness of the candybar itself. The latter factor, however, can't be explained by the exceptional battery life inherent in many devices with IP68 water resistance. The 6200mAh battery provides a typical 8-10 hours of screen time, and the charging power is low (20W). The 6.75-inch IPS display is very basic. Content clarity is poor at HD+ resolution, peak brightness slightly exceeds 500 nits, making images difficult to see in direct sunlight, and color reproduction is washed out. The only positive is the smooth image quality at the 120Hz refresh rate.

However, this is rarely achieved due to the performance limitations of the device's specifications. The UNISOC T7250 (Tiger T615) CPU, 6GB of RAM, and Mali G57MC1 GPU aren't always sufficient for the stable operation of the Android 16 interface. Apps sometimes launch slowly, and occasional stutters are encountered. The device isn't particularly suitable for gaming; only 3D titles that aren't excessively resource-intensive will run reasonably well. For example, PUBG Mobile on low graphics presets. The device has 128GB of storage, but can be expanded with a MicroSD card.

Don't expect much from the main 48-megapixel camera module and the secondary 0.08-megapixel sensor. You'll snap a photo of a document, a couple of daylight shots, and then put the device away. Poor lighting or dynamic objects will result in noise, blur, loss of detail, and other issues. There's no stereo sound, and the single speaker isn't impressive in terms of volume or frequency response balance. Among the positives, we note support for NFC and 5G. Therefore, the device under review is disappointing in terms of its IPS panel, exterior, and a number of other aspects, making it difficult to recommend.