Huawei Nova 3: A Quick Look

As OnePlus and Asus duke it out in the budget flagship segment, Huawei’s entering the ring with the Nova 3, which touts AI capabilities and four (yes, four!) camera sensors!

As with the recent Honor and Huawei smartphones, the Nova 3 nails the design brief – sure, the design language is similar, with thin bezels, a glossy (smudge-prone) glass back and a tall display with a notch, but the effect is still refreshing and the build quality leaves little to be desired and much to be envied by the competition! The tall 19.5:9 aspect ratio, 6.3-inch LCD screen offers good brightness levels and vivid colours, but there’s no scratch protection, which is an odd omission at the price.

Under the hood, the Nova 3 is equipped with Huawei’s top-end Kirin 970 chip, with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Now, while the chip is no pushover, it is getting long in the tooth and goes head-to-head against the OnePlus and the Asus, both of which sport the Snapdragon 845, a vastly superior chip in terms of performance. The phone received an update to enable the GPU Turbo software-level game enhancements, which helped with gameplay and framerates somewhat. Huawei’s EMUI is feature rich and slick to use, but the bloatware takes the shine off the experience. The 3D face unlock coupled with a snappy fingerprint scanner on the rear allow quick unlock options no matter how you are holding the Nova 3.

Let’s talk about all those cameras now. There is a dual-camera setup (16MP and 24MP) on the rear, with both cameras using f/1.8 lens, and a dual-camera (24MP f/2.0 and 2MP) setup on the front. Images from the rear cameras show good details  and the camera app’s AI features allow it to detect objects automatically and adjust the settings. The AI tends to favour over-saturated, over-processed images to keeping it real, so some may prefer to turn it off completely. Night photos suffer a bit due to the lack of optical image stabilisation. The front camera performed admirably while shooting solo or group selfies.