Huawei Nova 3 review

Display

The Nova 3 has a 6.3-inch, 2340x1080 resolution IPS LCD. The vertical resolution is a bit more than the Honor 10's 2280, which itself was a bit more than the P20 Pro's 2240, which is why the Nova 3 has an absurd 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

Display settings

The display on the Nova 3 is in no way special but it is still a good display, nonetheless. The phone ships with a saturated color profile with cool blue color temperature but you can set the display colors to what is simply labeled 'Normal' that looks close to standard sRGB color values and manually adjust the color temperature on the color wheel for a close approximation of the D65 white point.

Once set, the display looks quite satisfactory but still lacks the same level of color accuracy as Samsung's or OnePlus' color profiles. It may be too much to expect standard color profiles or even support for Android's native color management support from Huawei but the basic customization options provided are still better than nothing.

Being an LCD, it suffers the same pitfalls as other panels of its kind, with less than ideal contrast ratio being one of them. Simply put, blacks aren't perfectly black, which can occasionally be an issue for a phone with a notch. If the area surrounding the notch is to be pitch black in some app, then you still see a hint of grey if you happen to use the phone in the dark. While far from catastrophic, it still ruins the illusion of there not being any display at all that you'd get from an AMOLED.

Also, the area around the notch is noticeably darker when it is lit up, as the backlighting can't seem to reach the edges adequately. Indeed, if you're going to have a notch, the best course of action would be to have an AMOLED panel.

Strangely enough, the Nova 3 display misses out on one of the key advantages of having an LCD: peak brightness. The display is bright enough for indoor use but doesn't get too bright at its max setting. The display on the OnePlus 6 is brighter, despite being an AMOLED. And it's not that you can't raise the brightness manually; even in Auto brightness mode, the brightest point is about as high as manual brightness setting would go, so there's no hidden brightness there that comes out only when you need it.

Battery Life

The Nova 3 has a generous 3750mAh battery with support for Huawei's SuperCharge feature.

In our testing, the phone greatly impressed us with the battery life. Even after a long day of use, the phone would routinely have 30-40% left in the tank. We were getting upwards of 5 hours of screen time constantly.

Battery menu

All of this was without any battery saving features enabled except for whatever was running behind the scenes. Whatever it is, it works well as the phone merely sipped power instead of gulping it and we saw no adverse effects such as apps forcefully shutting in the background or refusing to start up. That is an issue you can get on the OnePlus 6 at times, which doesn't have a great battery life to begin with.

Where the OnePlus 6 gets a leg up is in charging speed. OnePlus' DASH charging is an industry benchmark and while Huawei's SuperCharge sounds promising, it's super disappointing.

Charging a phone from near zero to 100% takes two full hours. But it's not the final figure that's disappointing, it's how it gets there. Most phones push most of their juice in the first hour or so and then settle into a leisurely pace with trickle charging. The Nova 3 charges only 55% in the first hour and only about 25% in the first 30min. The charging speed seems very uniform across its two-hour charge time, which is very odd for a fast charging solution and not really ideal for quick top-up's.