Like expected, Huawei announced the brand new Honor 7i smartphone in an event today in China. The company had been teasing this unique device for the past couple of weeks, and now, its finally official. Like we saw in the TENAA images, the Honor 7i will indeed feature a flip-up camera module, which means, similar to the OPPO N1, the rear camera unit itself will be the front facing camera. However, instead of a rotating module, the Honor 7i’s camera unit will flip-up manually to take front facing shots.

This is definitely the best feature of the device. The flip-up camera can be adjusted to almost any angle within 180 degrees. This makes the phone ideal for taking low-angle shots. You can practically experiment with different angles to get the perfect shot that you need. With a powerful sensor at the back, you can take great pictures with the new Honor 7i.

The rear camera module is a 13MP sensor with a large f/2.0 aperture. The phone supports 4As, namely Auto Exposure, Auto White Balance, Automatic Face Recognition and Auto Smile Shutter. Huawei claims that the camera comes with SLR grade ISP translating into better low light performance, balance and less noise.The phone features multi-frame algorithm that intelligently fills light when under low lighting conditions.

It looks like the company has put in a lot of efforts in the Honor 7i’s camera module. Moreover, Huawei claims that you don’t have to worry about the flip-up camera, as its extremely sturdy and reliable. It is said that even if you use flip-up the camera module 132 times a day, it will still last for up to 2 years.

Another interesting feature of the Honor 7i is the side-mounted fingerprint sensor. Instead of a rear placed one like the Honor 7, this new device will feature the sensor on the side. This is an interesting placement not usually seen on smartphones, so we will have to see if this is more convenient than Home button integrated and rear placed sensors.

Apart from these two innovative features, the Honor 7i is pretty much a mid-range flagship. The phone comes with a 5.2-inch FHD LCD Negative display with a screen to body ratio of 79.8%. Under the hood, there’s the new Snapdragon 616 chipset with eight cores, reportedly much stable and low power consuming than its previous generation. There will be 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM on board along with 32GB of internal storage. As you can see, apart from the rotating camera & chipset, the specs are pretty much similar to the Honor 7 flagship. You further get 3100mAh battery, dual card dual standby and 4G LTE network connectivity.

Huawei has priced the Honor 7i quite aggressively. The phone will be available for pre-order later today for a starting price tag of 1599 Yuan (China Mobile version). The China Telecom version will cost you 1699 Yuan while the China Unicom version will cost you 1899 Yuan.

So, what do you think about the new Honor 7i?

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