HUAWEI’s nova Y74 is not trying to reinvent the budget smartphone. It is a familiar formula dressed in a fresher body: the same big silicon-carbon battery, the same modest chipset, and a design that looks much more current than the spec sheet would suggest. That mix makes sense for a brand that has spent years stretching older hardware with new styling, and it also explains why the phone feels more like a careful refresh than a true sequel.
That may sound cynical, but there is one area where Huawei still knows how to make a cheap phone feel unusually ambitious: endurance. The nova Y74’s 6620 mAh battery is still a strong number, even if the trick has now spread beyond Huawei’s lineup. Competition from brands such as Xiaomi and realme has made that capacity less of a headline and more of a baseline aspiration. The real question is whether Huawei can keep selling the feeling of premium polish on top of entry-level hardware.
nova Y74 design and build
The nova Y74 looks cleaner than the older model it effectively replaces. The rear camera island matches the body color and barely rises above the back panel, while the front uses a single hole-punch for the selfie camera instead of an older-style notch. Huawei also keeps the physical side shortcuts: the power key doubles as a fingerprint reader, and the X key on the left edge can launch selected apps.
There are two colors, black and blue. The phone is still not small or light, though: it measures 166.1 x 76.6 x 8.3 mm and weighs 210 grams. IP64 protection means rain is fine, dunking is not, and Huawei says the handset can survive drops from up to 1.8 meters, which sounds reassuring until physics gets a vote.
Kirin 710A, 90 Hz display and memory options
Inside, the hardware story is very much business as usual. The phone is powered by Kirin 710A, an eight-core chip built on 14 nm process technology, paired with ARM Mali-G51 MP4 graphics and a dedicated machine-learning processor. In day-to-day use, that translates to a smartphone that gets the job done, but not with any sense of urgency.
- Display: 6.67-inch IPS panel, 1604 x 720 pixels, 264 ppi, 90 Hz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM with 128 GB or 256 GB storage
- Connectivity: dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.1, NFC, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BeiDou, QZSS
- SIM: two nano-SIM slots, no eSIM support
The screen is a compromise, and Huawei does not pretend otherwise. The 720p-class resolution is low for a 6.67-inch panel, so text can look a little jagged, but the 90 Hz refresh rate helps scrolling feel smoother than the price would predict. That is exactly the sort of trade-off budget buyers end up making: sharper display, or longer battery life. Here, Huawei picked the second one and built the rest of the phone around it.
Camera, software and battery life
The rear camera setup is stripped down to a single 50-megapixel module with f/1.8 optics and phase-detection autofocus. There is no optical stabilization and no real telephoto trickery, so anything beyond the main view is just software zoom. The camera is decent in good light, slightly rough around the edges in processing, and more acceptable indoors than the bargain-bin label might imply.
Huawei’s better card is battery life. The 6620 mAh silicon-carbon cell pairs neatly with the lower-resolution display and the relatively old chip, and the result is the kind of stamina that makes daily charging feel optional. Huawei includes a 40 W wired charger in the box, which should keep the long runtime from turning into a long wait.
EMUI 12 handles the software side, with the usual Huawei setup based on open-source Android and no Google services out of the box. The interface is stable, if not especially brisk, and that sums up the nova Y74 pretty well: competent, polished, and a little behind the pace set by rivals. At 15,999 rubles for the 8+128 GB version and 17,999 rubles for 8+256 GB, it is probably strongest for buyers who value battery life above specs-sheet bragging rights. The catch is obvious enough – this is a restyle, not a reinvention – so the next move from Huawei will have to be something more than a new coat of paint.