Since 2014, both Huawei and Lenovo have become key players in the affordable smartphone market in India, launching several budget smartphones across price points.
Lenovo received a good response to its Lollipop driven smartphone A7000, while Huawei has moved on with its plan to impress camera-loving budget consumers by launching the Honor 4C.
Interestingly, both the smartphones are available for ₹8,999 on Flipkart.
Huawei has put all its phones on open sale, meaning you don't need to through the cumbersome, pre-registration process to own a Huawei phone. But the only way to buy a A7000 is flash sales conducted every Wednesday.
Both A7000 and Honor 4C have their pros and cons. Let's find out which one of the two smartphones suits you better.
[Read More- Lenovo A7000 Review]
Design and Build
A7000 and Honor 4C cater to different consumer preferences. While the A7000 is meant for phablet lovers, the Honor 4C is much compact in size.
Both smartphones offer decent build quality, but the A7000 back cover feels a bit fragile when separated from the device. In spite of featuring a matte finished back cover, the A7000 back is also prone to fingerprints and smudges. In contrast, the Honor 4C sports a textured back cover, which feels more rugged, yet compact in hand.
The button layout is similar but the chrome ring around the back camera and LED Flash make the Honor 4C look much stylish than the A7000.
While Lenovo A7000 weighs 140g, the Honor 4C weighs 22g more, making it a tad heavy. The A7000 measures 152.6x76.2x8mm whereas the Honor 4C measures 143.3x71.9x8.8mm.
[Read More- Huawei Honor 4C Review]
Winner- Honor 4C
Display
Both Lenovo A7000 and Huawei Honor 4C have maintained the standard 720p display on board. The Lenovo A7000 houses a 5.5.-inch, 720x1280 pixel, 267PPI display with a screen-to-body ratio of 71.7%, while Huawei Honor 4C has a 5-inch, 720x1280 pixel, 294PPI display with a screen-to-body ratio of 66.9%.
Using both the smartphones for a long period, we found both A7000 and Honor 4C offering a display of optimum colours with crisp icons, texts, decent viewing angle and readability under brightly lit conditions.
[Read More- Lenovo A7000 vs Xiaomi Mi 4i Review]
Winner - None, it's a tie
Performance
The A7000 packs a MediaTek MT6752m that combines a quad-core octa-core 1.5GHz Cortex-53 processor and a Mali-T760MP2 GPU, along with 2GB RAM memory.
By comparison, the Honor 4C is powered by a home baked octa-core HiSillicon Kirin 620 SoC that combines a 1.2GHz octa-core processor and a Mali MP4 GPU, making it similar to Snapdragon's 410 SoC. The Honor 4C also features 2GB RAM memory.
Benchmarking both the phones on Antutu and GeekBench, the A7000 scored much higher than the Honor 4C.
Lenovo A7000 scored 42964 in Antutu, 739 single-core and 3680 multi-core in GeekBench, while the Honor 4C scored 26796 in Antutu, 548 single-core and 1570 multi-core score in GeekBench.
Though the operating system version of A7000 helped it score better, the huge difference between the two clearly explains A7000 can perform better with graphic heavy games.
In real life use, we found both the devices capable of handling several apps and browser tabs at a time without any stutter.
Winner- A7000
Operating System
The Lenovo A7000 runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop overlaid with Lenovo's custom interface Vibe UI, while the Honor 4C runs on a heavily customised Emoticon UI 3.0 over dated Android Kiktkat 4.4.4 operating system.
Although the interface of the Honor 4C is decent enough in use, the Kitkat 4.4 lacks several new additions of Android including notification and security. We wish Huawei considers bringing the Android update soon.
Moving forward with the skin, both Vibe UI and EMUI feature useful tools but lack the app drawer like other Chinese smartphones.
Winner- A7000
Camera
The Lenovo A7000 packs an 8MP rear camera with Autofocus, Face Detection and Geo Tagging. Honor 4C features a 13MP rear camera with self timer and Autofocus.
Both the smartphones feature identical 5MP front camera, but while the A7000 features a dual tone LED, the Honor 4C sticks to single LED for snapping in challenging lights.
In real world use, both the cameras click well in ambient light, but suffer in poorly lit conditions. Both the cameras are fast while detecting the subject and don't take much time between clicking and saving photos.
Comparing images clicked by both the smartphones in similar light conditions, we found A7000's camera processor brightens and exaggerates the images a bit. The trick has proved useful in the Christmas bell macro image, but in ample light, the images have a slightly blue tint. By comparison, the Honor 4C's rear camera offers better details with balanced colours and more brightness.
If real life performance, the Honor 4C would definitely be the choice.
Winner- Honor 4C
Battery
The A7000 is powered by a 2,900 mAh battery, while the Honor 4C packs a non-removable 2550 mAh battery.
On paper, the two batteries have huge differences but in real life we found both of them pretty similar. Both offer life lasting for a day in mixed usage of keeping the phone connected to 3G+Wi-Fi, calling a few hours and keeping the social apps on.
However, the removable battery of A7000 might prove useful to several consumers as they are easy to swap when required.
Winner- None, it's a tie
Storage
Both the A7000 and Honor 4C comes with 8GB built-in storage expandable up to 32GB.
Verdict
The Lenovo A7000 features a better processor which helps it score over the Honor 4C.
Another advantage of Lenovo A7000 is that it runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop out-of the-box. But it gets beaten by the camera performance of the Honor. The Lenovo A7000 is for those who prefer heavy usage, including gaming.
