Huawei nova review: Life of a Star

Telephony

The Huawei nova handles voice calls with ease and sound quality doesn't disappoint. The phone offers powerful dual-SIM manager in case you opt for the dual-SIM flavor, too.

Smart dialing • recent calls • call log • the phonebook • a single contact

The stock dialer app is a trinity of tabs bundled together - these include the Dialer, Contacts, and Favorites. The phonebook offers all the usual sorting and display options, it supports multiple accounts, and there are lots of fields available for each contact.

The Huawei nova scored a Very Good mark in our standardized loudspeaker test. Our impressions from the speaker's sound quality are mostly positive though its audio output is less pleasant as it was on the nova plus. The sound is a bit shallow and lacks bass, but it's loud enough to be heard.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Sony Xperia X	61.3	61.1	65.7	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy C7	67.3	67.8	72.8	Average
OnePlus 3	62.4	71.0	77.8	Good
Huawei nova plus	68.3	68.0	76.9	Good
Huawei P9	72.1	66.6	75.6	Good
Huawei P9 lite	66.0	71.5	83.2	Very Good
Huawei nova	69.2	71.9	80.6	Very Good
Meizu MX5	75.7	73.5	79.5	Excellent

App package

The Huawei nova ships with WPS office, which can be used for some basic document editing on the go. It can handle text documents, spreadsheets and presentations as well as PDF files. It can also export to PDF.

WPS office

Phone Manager is Huawei's do-it-all app for keeping control over your phone. It lets you control all sorts of features from call/message privacy and Do Not Disturb settings to phone optimization and app permissions, to network and battery usage.

The app features a one-touch optimization feature that frees up memory space and gives you settings recommendations for maximum battery performance. It's a hell of a slick feature that few manufacturers offer.

Phone manager

Battery Manager is part of Phone Manager and includes a selection of three power plans with varying degrees of feature limitations. From here you can also control which apps can remain active after you send the phone to sleep.

Battery manager