Huawei Nova 12 Review: specs and features, camera quality test, gaming benchmark, user opinions and photos

Huawei Nova 12 - unlike competitors

The Chinese company Huawei continues to delight its fans with an abundance of current smartphones at a reasonable price. The manufacturer is well aware of the shortcomings of its products, namely the lack of Google services and the HarmonyOS operating system, which is not always user-friendly, so it tries to surprise customers with other aspects of its new products. So, the hero of today's review focuses on design and an updated chipset.

The appearance of the gadget was really successful. The designers have done a tremendous job to make the combination of the original colors of the thin glass body, the magnificent block of photo modules, and the barely noticeable display frames look impressive. The under-screen fingerprint scanner also adds points of attractiveness to the exterior; the only thing we can find fault with is the plastic edging. The 6.7-inch AMOLED display has FullHD+ resolution, standard for the price category, but it has many other advantages. Thus, the picture refresh rate reached an impressive 120 hertz, and the peak brightness approached 2000 nits. The color rendition is realistic, there is a high-quality oleophobic coating.

The technical characteristics are the proprietary Kirin 830 processor with support for 5G networks, 8GB/12GB of RAM. For the first time, the CPU used in mobile devices scores about 700 thousand points in the AnTuTu benchmark, thanks to which the OS interface is more than smooth, and launching even resource-intensive applications takes a fraction of a second. Gamers will not get flagship performance in demanding games like Honkai: Star Rail, but with average graphics presets, even such projects will avoid lag. A 4600mAh battery today looks mediocre compared to solutions of 5000-6000mAh or more, but the energy efficiency of the chip brings battery life to 7-8 hours of active screen time. Fast wired charging with a power of 100W will help the battery gain capacity in 20 minutes; there is also a much slower wireless analogue. The size of the permanent memory is 256/512GB of ROM; there is no slot for MicroSD cards.

The place of the main cameras was taken by a main 50-megapixel sensor with hybrid stabilization and a simple 8-megapixel wide-angle lens. While the auxiliary module is unlikely to receive compliments, the 50MP camera can handle both daytime and evening shots without any problems. Even when shooting at night, it’s easy to get shots with decent detail and without excess noise. There is stereo sound, but its volume is low, and the speakers do not work quite evenly. But the list of advantages is expanding due to NFC contactless payments, a gyroscope, and a 60-megapixel selfie camera. As a result, we have an imperfect, but interesting and balanced device for its price tag that deserves to be purchased.