Huawei’s last year’s Nova and Nova Plus smartphones were sort of lackluster devices. They were positioned in an already crowded mid-range smartphone market, without any traits that made them stand out from crowd.
Fast-forward to 2017, and the company has now launched the new Nova 2 Plus onto the market. The smartphone has received a design overhaul that makes it look more of a premium device. It also accompanies a dual camera setup at the back.
The overall design and build quality is very good. The metal body has a pleasing grain to the finish. The device itself is available in a wide range of colours such as black, gold, and blue. We received the black version for a test drive.
The overall design of the Nova 2 Plus is reminiscent of the Huawei P10, with the antenna bands blending into the body, minimal branding, and a dual-lens camera at the top. On the front, you get a 5.5-inch screen that offers a resolution of 1080-by-1920 pixels. A piece of 2.5D curved glass is fixed over the display.
The phone measures just 6.9mm in thickness and weighs around 169-gms. Under the hood, the phone runs on a Huawei-made Kirin 659 processor with 4GB of RAM. You also get 64GB of internal storage space, which can be expanded to up to 128GB using a micro SD card. The battery of the Nova 2 Plus is rated at 3340mAh.
The Huawei Nova 2 Plus is powered by Android 7.0 Nougat operating system along with Huawei’s very own EMUI 5.1 UI built on top of it. When you flip the phone around, you see Huawei’s trademark – the dual camera system. The camera system however, is Huawei’s very own and isn’t powered by the LEICA technology, as you might have seen on the Mate series or the P10 and P10 Plus.
On the Nova 2 Plus, one of the cameras is rated 12-megapixels, while the other is an 8-megapixel lens. Just next to the camera system is a an LED flash module and just below sits the fingerprint sensor. Up front, you also get a 20-megapixel camera for all your selfies.
Photography has always been the strength of Hauwei devices and that is also the case with the Nova 2 Plus. Images taken outdoors were brilliant. Indoor shots were good, too, though sometimes they lacked the vibrancy that the outdoors shots exhibited.
Huawei also adds a new mode called Moving Picture, which when triggered shoots a short video and then converts it into a sort of GIF animated image. The 20-megapixel front camera managed to capture some really good selfies.
We ran the AnTuTu Benchmark on the device and were able to clock 61476 point. Of course, it is a mid-range device and is not meant to offer powerhouse performance. However, in terms of real world performance, it slid through the menus and in and out of apps without a problem. It was also able to handle all the jobs we threw at it – whether it was gaming, productivity apps, music, or videos.
For a price of AED 1399, the Huawei Nova 2 Plus is an amazing buy. It may not buy you flagship-like performance, but the Nova 2 Plus definitely manages to make a positive first impression.
Price: AED 1399
