Honor says it's basically managed to cram a nigh 6-inch display into the body of a 5.5-inch phone. What the company really means by that is that it's following the flagship trend of eliminating as much bezel as possible to flood the phone's face with pixels, hence the tagline "FullView." It's a good enough attempt but doesn't quite nail the edge-to-edge aesthetic of, say, the Galaxy S8. Truly bezel-less, the Honor 7X is not.

Despite its size, the 7X is comfortable to use even if you can't get to every corner of the screen with just the one thumb. The phone is incredibly light considering its size, metal body and reinforced corners; and there are no sharp angles to dig into your palms as you shift it around to probe far-flung regions of the display. The 7X's 5.93-inch, 18:9, 2,160 x 1,080 LCD screen is undoubtedly the star of the show here. It's big and full of detail, and it cuts through even the brightest of daylight. It can also dim to as low as 3 nits so as not to tax your eyes when you're thumbing through the pages of Engadget while dozing under the covers.

You could argue that the big screen is particularly media friendly, but you have to bear in mind that not a great deal is shot with an 18:9 aspect ratio. That means the majority of YouTube videos, as an example, are letterboxed to the left and right of the frame. The camera viewfinder takes up only two-thirds of the screen, for the same reason. There are a couple of features specific to this tall display, though. First, there's a one-key split-screen mode that works with a few messaging apps, including WhatsApp and the standard SMS client.

Should you get a WhatsApp notification while you're watching a video, let's say, you can hit the Android multitasking key and it'll load the app up into another window, side-by-side style. It's kinda like Android's inline reply functionality, but more like Facebook Messenger's bubble, in that it lets you see all the recent chatter in the thread. Honor has also partnered with Gameloft so players of the mobile FPS title Modern Combat Versus get a wider 18:9 field of view while running 'n' gunning on the 7X.

Don't let that big and bright display distract you from the Honor 7X's shortcomings, however. Don't get me wrong: There are other things to like about the handset, the camera being one of them. Or rather, the dual-camera arrangement, featuring one 16-megapixel color sensor paired with a 2-megapixel monochrome number and phase-detection autofocus to boot. Unlike some Huawei phones with a similar setup that can take native black-and-white shots, though, this 2MP sensor is purely capturing lighting and depth information. The data is used to improve contrast and low-light performance, as well as enable you to play around with depth of field to inject digital bokeh into your pics using the aperture setting.