Huawei Nova 3i Review

The Huawei Nova 3i did everything I want my smartphone to do. It Googled. It texted. It navigated. It streamed music and movies. It took photos that looked great to my admittedly amateur eye. And it did it all in a speedy and reliable fashion. 

Basically, I had no complaints. Except for the slow, growing feeling that the Huawei Nova 3i might be haunted.

Ghost in the shell

This is what happened. I started to notice that my phone was falling off things. Like my bedside table. And my desk. It never fell off things while I was watching it. It always seemed to wait until the exact moment my back was turned. Or until I was asleep. And then crash. The Huawei Nova 3i was on the floor.

These strange occurrences continued for about a week or so until one day it was sitting beside me at my desk when I saw it move. On its own.

I'll repeat that. The phone moved on its own. And no, it wasn't vibrating while receiving a call. And yes, it was on a flat surface. It was in sleep mode and it was slowly gliding across my desk.

I have witnesses. The phone made it about 15 centimetres before it finally hit the keyboard. And I've been able to replicate this behaviour on several occasions. There are only two possible explanations as to why the phone would exhibit this extraordinary behaviour. One: it's posssessed. Or two: it's way too slippery.

The Nova 3i has clearly been designed with fashion in mind. At 6.3 inches the display is almost edge to edge. It's got that iPhone X notched look, which you can black out using the display settings if it doesn't float your boat. And crucially, not only are the front and back of the Nova 3i all glass, but Huawei has added a textured film to the back designed to catch the light.

All of this means it's shiny as hell and offers very little grip. Which is a concern for a phone made of glass. Seriously. I've handled a fair few glass-backed phones, and none of them seemed determined to escape my grip like the Nova 3i. And speaking of attempts to escape ... the movement. The creepy, creepy movement.

To be fair, the Huawei Nova 3i doesn't move on its own on all surfaces. The ghost inside the shell seems respond to certain textures, like the slightly grainy plastic surface of my desk. I have also found that the Nova 3i is more likely to go glide-about when it's placed with one or more of its corners hanging (even slightly) over the edge of a surface.

It will also take even the tiniest inclining angle as an invitation to roam free. Remember how it fell off my bedside table? I had it sitting on a pile of books. Okay, they don't sit totally flat. But in my defense, other devices have been able to handle their glossy slopes. Not so the Nova 3i.

Now, you may love the idea of owning a haunted phone. It's definitely an original concept. But for anyone who finds this idea concerning, I would definitely recommend buying a case. There aren't many on the market yet but they are available from the online retailer AliBaba, with free shipping from China to Australia.

Apart from the ghost, it was great

Of course, the Nova 3i is more than just a haunted machine. It's also a phone, and it does the job of being a phone very well.

The Full High Definition Plus display on the Nova 3i is great. Clear, vibrant, detailed. I'm not saying that on a flagship phone you can't get better. You can. But the Nova 3i gets about 85% of the way there and looked plenty good enough for me, especially for $599.

Huawei is known for making phones with great battery life an the Nova 3i is no exception. After a day of heavy use I still had a full 40% left. When my usage was less demanding the battery life stretched to a full two days, finishing out the second with a narrow but workable 15% of charge left.

The Nova 3i's Face ID and fingerprint reader were equally as impressive. The fingerprint reader was fast and accurate and handled many a fumbled partial print. The Face ID was also super fast. It handled pretty much every angle I threw at it and it even worked in complete darkness. It couldn't handle my sunglasses but that's an issue that's fairly common to devices in this price range and I was willing to forgive.

Although the Nova 3i came with a few too many pre-installed apps for my liking and didn't handle my attempt to customise it with Nova Launcher (no affiliation), all in all it offered pretty impressive performance. It's a dual SIM device and comes with 128GB of built-in storage, expandable with microSD up to 256GB. You can get it in plain black or shiny Iris purple.

The camera is AI

The Huawei Nova 3i camera takes pretty great photos for a phone of its price range. The total set-up involves four cameras: two front and two rear. The primary rear camera is 16MP while the primary front camera is 24MP, and both are augmented by a secondary camera of 2MP. This set-up is intended to deliver sharper, more natural snaps in general as well as portraits with more depth of field in particular.

Of course, there's a limit to what fancy dual camera set-ups can do for my photography. I'm your classic amateur snapper – I point and I click. Which is why the Huawei Nova 3i cameras all come with AI. The idea behind the AI camera is that I, the novice photographer, get to bumble around pointing my camera at whatever takes my fancy while the AI recognises what's happening in shot and adjusts the settings accordingly. Huawei calls this scene recognition and I was keen to try it out.

I have to say, I was a bit disappointed. The AI did recognise objects in my shots such as "cat" or "plant" and dutifully told me so. And the resulting photos were a little more detailed and vivid than comparison shots I took with the AI switched off. Maybe I was being unreasonable when I imagined I'd be transformed into a professional photographer. In the end, I'd call the AI a feature that's nice to have. But it didn't wow me.

And then there were the extra AI features that come with the camera's portrait mode. These include 3D lighting, beautification and bokeh (that's background blurring in portraits for those of us who don't speak fluent Photography). The bokeh setting provided some nice background blurring, although in certain shots it also blurred out sections of my hair. I can't honestly say that the 3D lighting settings made any exciting differences to my selfies. Some of them, such as the stage lighting setting and the classic lighting setting, just made the background entirely black and, again, blurred out a lot of my hair.

When I tried out the beautification setting things got stranger. It came with adjustments of a scale of 0 to 10. Naturally, I assumed that there's no such thing as too much beautification, so I dialled the thing straight up to 10, which transformed me into a Doctor Who style monster with a pale flesh-mask for a face and creepy glistening eyeballs. It also, again, blurred out random sections of my hair.

When I got the beautification setting down to about 3, it did make my skin look a bit smoother and less blemished than normal. Again, this seemed like more of a nice to have feature rather than something that will really change your selfie game.

Camera samples

Who's the Huawei Nova 3i for?

Ghost lovers. And people who want to see themselves as Doctor Who villains.

Seriously, jokes aside, despite the quirks, the Huawei Nova 3i delivers solid performance that should be enough to satisfy most everyday smartphone users. The AI camera won't wow you, but it definitely does make photos better and anyone who likes to just point and click will be able to appreciate that.

If you're a purist who can't stand to put a case on their phone, the Huawei Nova 3i isn't for you. But if you don't mind slapping on a little protection against the spirit-world, it's not a deal breaker. And if you don't want to shell out a $1000+ for a phone but still want something that feels a bit flagship, the Huawei Nova 3i could be for you.

I don't want a Huawei Nova 3i, what else can I buy?

OPPO R15

At $659, the Oppo R15 is a great buy, with a 6.28-inch 1080p+ display, eight-core Helio P60 processor, 128GB expandable storage, 6GB RAM, facial recognition and two-day battery life. For an extra $120 you can upgrade again to the OPPO R15 Pro which also comes with water-resistance and even more processing power.

Nokia 7 Plus

The Nokia 7 Plus is another solid mid-tier Android option, coming in at $649. The design isn't quite "on trend" as the OPPO R15 and you don't get the water-resistance of the OPPO R15 Pro, but it's worth considering for its clean, unfettered take on Android.

Huawei Mate 10

If you like Huawei but not sure about the Nova 3i, you could spend a little more for the Mate 10. It's $799 and out of last year's top phones, the Mate 10 was one of our favourites. It's got an all glass design, a two-day battery, and excellent cameras. 

Huawei Nova 3e

If you want Huawei but want to spend less, at $399 the Huawei Nova 3e is a capable budget smartphone with flagship looks. It comes with the (perhaps too) shiny glass back, the on-trend notched display, and a hot new vertical rear-camera configuration

Jacqui Dent

Editorial Strategist

Jacqui Dent is an Editorial Content Strategist at WhistleOut Australia, where she writes about mobile phone plans, NBN plans and everything in between. Over her ten-year career, she has worked to provide informed advice to the public, first in the sphere of writing and now in the world of consumer tech. Jacqui has also written about consumer telco products for Business Insider, Pedestrian and the 50Up Club.

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