Huawei Nova 2i review: Plans | Pricing | Specs

Alex Kidman•24 September 2018

Huawei Nova 2i review: Plans | Pricing | Specs

The good

Large 18:9 display
Four onboard cameras

Fast fingerprint sensor

The bad

No NFC on board
Display isn't great in direct sunlight
Ordinary battery life for such a large handset
Not as flexible as other dual camera phones, even at this price point

The Huawei Nova 2i is a phone of many names. I've honestly no idea why it's the "2i" here in Australia, what with the last member of that family being the Huawei Nova Plus. Beyond that, if you buy the exact same hardware elsewhere on the planet, it may be the Maimang 6, the Honor 9i or indeed the Huawei Mate 10 Lite – same phone, many names.

I'm not entirely sure why Huawei didn't decide to co-opt the better known branding of its Mate series for its mid-range phablet device. Still, whatever it's called, it's a phone that sells itself on a few key features, although its headline act isn't actually its best feature in use.

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Design

The 18:9 5.9-inch display is an impressive inclusion at this price point
Light and easy to hold despite its large screen

Read our full review of the Huawei Nova 2i's design

The Huawei Nova 2i stands out immediately for its 18:9 aspect ratio screen, putting it in similar technical company to devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S8+ or Huawei's own Mate 10 Pro. In the case of the Nova 2i, it's a 5.9-inch display at a resolution of 2160x1080, so it has lower resolution than competing premium full-screen display phones, but still quite impressive for what is, after all, a mid-range phone handset.

The one caveat I've noticed during testing of the Nova 2i is that it's not terribly good in direct sunlight, even with the brightness cranked up as high at it can go. However, under less extreme lighting situations, it's great to have a large screen display for watching video on the daily commute or for most gaming purposes.

The inclusion of such a large display screen doesn't give Huawei much room to breathe when it comes to the design of the rest of the Huawei Nova 2i. It measures in at 156.2x75.2x7.5mm with a carrying weight of 164 grams, making it quite light for a larger screened phone.

The rear of the handset is largely a blank slate, with a fingerprint sensor sitting below the vertically mounted dual camera array. It's ultimately a rather bland design that pretty much just gets on with the business of being a smartphone without offering much in the way of additional flair.

That's somewhat par for the course for mid-range handsets, but we have seen some manufacturers putting more into their mid-range offerings to make them more desirable from a fashion viewpoint than Huawei has managed here.

Camera

Secondary lenses are for adjusting focus only, limiting their utility
Nevertheless, camera quality is solid for a mid-range smartphone

See sample photos and read our full review of the Huawei Nova 2i's camera

The Huawei Nova 2i has a key selling point, or to be more strictly accurate, four of them. While we've seen plenty of dual lens premium handsets, and even a few models in the mid-range adopting dual lens arrays, Huawei's upped the game by making the Nova 2i dual lens on both sides. That means that at the front, you get a 13MP sensor paired with a 2MP sensor, while at the back, there's a 16MP sensor paired with a 2MP sensor.

All of which sounds suitably sexy because more is always better, right?

Well... maybe. It's worth recognising what Huawei has and hasn't done here in the broader context of dual lens camera phones because the Nova 2i's implementation is very much all about focus, and how much of it you actually want. Other handsets pair their second lens with some kind of secondary feature, such as a zoom, wide angle or monochrome feature, while also using that secondary lens to enable a portrait style feature with bokeh effects.

Focus effects are all the Nova 2i's secondary lenses are used for. Indeed, within Huawei's own camera app, there's no direct way to shoot just with the secondary lenses at all, so the only way they come into play is when you're taking a photo and want to adjust the general focus. That's a little more limited in sheer photographic terms for the rear cameras compared with competing phones, although it's nicely situated if you're a huge selfie fan with aspirations to getting better looking personal shots.

You can select your level of bokeh in your shot while taking portraits or selfies. Here's our office plant sans any kind of blur:

And here's the same happy plant with blur at full:

Here's a (very rare) selfie of your author:

And the same thing with selfie bokeh enabled:

The Nova 2i's beauty mode works just like any other, which is to say that these filters always make me look like an alien space potato. Your own experience and level of personal beauty may of course vary.

You're not limited to just straight portraits of course. In general photography, the Huawei Nova 2i performs as well as you might expect a mid-range handset to operate. If you're keen on all things Huawei, the P10, the P10 Plus or the Mate 10/Mate 10 Pro are no doubt going to offer better quality, but the Nova 2i is perfectly adequate for someone on a budget. Here are some sample shots taken with the Huawei Nova 2i:

Performance

Delivers nothing more or less than your average mid-range smartphone
Completely adequate for most standard phone activities

See test results and read our full review of the Huawei Nova 2i's performance

The Huawei Nova 2i runs on Huawei's own Octa-Core Kirin 659 SoC with 4GB ROM and 64GB RAM. Where Huawei has in the past tended towards using third-party silicon (usually Mediatek-based), it has instead gone in-house for the Nova 2i – with results that are predictably mid-range. Here's how the Nova 2i compares against a range of similarly priced handsets using Geekbench 4's CPU test:

And here's how it compares using 3DMarks' Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark against the same handsets:

Benchmarks are never the full story on performance, but in the case of the Nova 2i, they're a very solid indicator of the kind of experience you're likely to get out of the handset. It's certainly not a nippy handset, but it's equally not as sluggish as many handsets we've tested. In other words, it's a mid-range handset with absolutely mid-range performance.

One notable omission from the Huawei Nova 2i's arsenal is NFC communication. It's not present, which means that if your financial institution supports Android Pay, and that's a feature you want, you'd do well to look elsewhere.

Battery life

Capable of surviving a full day of typical use
Still, we expected more out of a 3,340mAh battery

See test results and read our full review of the Huawei Nova 2i's battery life

We've seen some really great battery test results out of some recent mid-range handsets, thanks to the use of lower-power processors along with reasonable battery capacities, often rivalling those of higher-end handsets. Huawei packs a 3,340mAh sealed battery into the Nova 2i's frame, which should have given it some real muscle when it came to battery life.

Anecdotally, it's feasible to get a full day's battery use out of the Nova 2i in most circumstances, but it's not the strongest phone we've seen. Here's how it compared against the field using Geekbench 3's battery test:

While there are phones in similar price and performance brackets with worse battery life, the Huawei Nova 2i really doesn't do much to stand out here against the broad mid-range pack. That's especially true given it holds onto the older microUSB charging standard, while other competitor phones in the price bracket are shifting towards USB C.

Verdict

Forget the four cameras; it's the Nova 2i's massive 5.9-inch 18:9 screen that sets it apart from the competition

Read our full Huawei Nova 2i verdict

The Huawei Nova 2i is a really interesting phone because it shows very clearly how mid-range devices are trying to stand out from their peers. The whole four-camera array makes for a great headline, and it's in no real way a "bad" camera system, but it's not exactly a standout in terms of visual fidelity either.

There's arguably more to be had out of that large full-screen display because it's playing into the design trend of 2017 for minimal bezels, even if the rest of the Nova 2i feels a little under-designed.

However, you're rather spoiled for choice in the mid-range when it comes to handsets. The excellent OnePlus 5 is clearly a better performance phone than the Nova 2i, but it is a little more pricey, and critically, it's going to be harder to source given the rather slow entry into the local market by OnePlus. Motorola's offerings, such as the Motorola X4 or Motorola G5S Plus, are also worth consideration, and if you're after a more stylish phone, some of Nokia's mid-range efforts, such as the Nokia 5, are also worth putting into contention.

That doesn't mean you should jump to any of them over and above the Huawei Nova 2i, but you should certainly compare widely. If nothing else, it's great to have such a wide variety of approaches and choices at the mid-range price point.