The Honor 7X boasts a brilliant blend of Android OS and Huawei’s Emotion UI 5.1, which means there’s a fountain of awesome features geysering forth from every orifice. Here’s some of the best bits you might not know about.
Activate that apps drawer
For some reason, these Honor phones always come with the apps tray switched off – which means all of those apps that Honor shoves on the device are just spread around the desktops. For an OCD nutter like me, that’s bad times.
Thankfully it’s easy enough to get the apps tray back. Just jump into the Honor 7X’s settings menu and then tap on Home Screen Style. In here you’ll spy two separated options: Standard and Drawer. Select Drawer and you’re good to go – by which we mean, delete all of that crap off of your desktops.
Easy one-handed use
The Honor 7X may have quite slender bezels, but it’s still a bit of a beast thanks to that near-6-inch display. Which means one-handed use is about as easy as teaching complex algebra to a giraffe. Thankfully there are some nifty tools packed into EMUI to help out.
Head to the settings and then tap the Smart Assistance option and find the ‘One-handed UI’ offering. In this sub-menu you can activate the Mini Screen View feature, which shrinks the entire display down towards the bottom of the phone when needed. The slightly awkward thumb-flick gesture takes a wee bit of getting used to, although it’s worth persevering with. And inside of that menu you can also choose to have a more compact virtual keyboard, which again helps out when using one-handed.
If you’re struggling to reach the top of the Honor 7X’s screen to pull down the notifications tab, no worries. Just head to the Fingerprint ID section of the phone’s settings menu and enable the ‘show notification panel’ option. You can now swipe a fingertip down the rear-mounted scanner to drag down your notifications.
Alternatively, head to the Navigation Key section of the settings and you can add a fourth button to that on-screen toolbar, which pulls the tab into view. From that menu you can also swap around the order of your back and recent apps buttons.
Go full-screen in apps
Not that many apps are currently optimised for the 18:9 aspect ratio of the Honor 7X’s screen. That means you’ll notice a strange ‘Full Screen Display’ icon appearing at the bottom of quite a few apps when you load them up. Give that a tap and you’ll find the view stretches and morphs to fit the whole screen, which is much more pleasing to the eye.
If you want to undo this at any time, simply head to the display section of the settings menu and tap the Full Screen Display option. This shows you all of the apps which aren’t optimised for that stretched-out panel and allows you to toggle the full screen mode on or off.
Live a double life with the App Twin mode
The Honor’s App Twin feature allows you to sign into some of your social and messaging accounts with two different accounts at the same time – good news if you have a freaky, sexy online alias, just as one completely random example.
To activate this feature, just head to the settings menu and scroll to the App Twin option and give that a tap. Activate App Twin for any app you wish to use it with and a duplicate app will then be created on your Honor 7X. This can be used immediately to sign in with a new account.
What is Eye Comfort Mode?
The helpful Eye Comfort Mode makes the visuals warm and easy-on-the-eye in the evenings, which means your bed fellows won’t be disturbed by a piercing glare when you stream some of those awesome Recombu videos at 2am. This can be scheduled to automatically activate every night at a set time, so you don’t even have to manually fiddle about.
Just head to the Display section of the Honor 7X’s settings menu and then tap Eye Comfort, to activate it or set a schedule. Job done.
Test out the Floating Dock
This one’s a bit of a love-or-hate affair, but we definitely say check it out to see if it’s for you.
Head to the settings menu and then the Smart Assistance section and you have the option to turn on the Floating Dock. This is a virtual button which can be moved to any position along the Honor 7X’s edges and tapped at any time to bring up a circular menu. Options includes back, home and recent apps options, which is handy if you find it awkward to stretch your thumb to the very bottom of the screen. You can also hibernate the handset or clean the clutter from the phone’s memory with just a tap.
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