Wiko

Wiko

Wiko may be a small smartphone company in the Malaysian market, but you really can’t deny that it has  much better product names than the rest of the competition, especially with its stylish entry-level Y range smartphones such as the Robby, Lenny 3 and Jerry. The Wiko Harry is the latest entry-level handset that the company thinks will attract the young and outgoing audience, which is why it has been equipped with 3GB of RAM and 4G connectivity, so the question here is, what does this new kid have apart from these features to appeal to its audience?

Design and Hardware

As an entry-level handset, I have to give it to Wiko for always doing great in product design, the Harry is handsome and you won’t think that this is going to be some cheap smartphone. The phone features a removable metal back cover that has been used in many other Wiko products, the finishing looks good with a brushed aluminum style, which adds a little premium feel to it. Other notably good design practices include the well positioned MicroUSB port and headphone jack on the top, which doesn’t block hands when charging and using the device at the same time, the Wiko Harry also feels right on hand with a good balance of weight and a reasonable 9.1mm body profile, this is something that some entry-level handsets haven’t been doing well, which they are sometimes either too lightweight or too heavy.

Remove the back cover, and you will be greeted with a removable 2500mAh battery, though an unimpressive battery size, a removable battery is already becoming rare on smartphones these days, which you can still purchase one and swap if you can’t wait for it to be fully charged. In addition, Wiko still isn’t moving forward with Micro SIM cards as the Harry still features two of them, a MicroSD card is present for storage expanding the phone’s 16GB storage capacity.

The Harry, however, misses a few things on its hardware offerings, such as a fingerprint scanner, which is necessary even on an entry-level smartphone these days, the phone’s 5-inch display can also be a little small for some despite having decent brightness outdoors. Most importantly, the Harry is still using the very same quad-core Mediatek MT6737 1.3 GHz processor which has been found on other Wiko devices, you won’t find too much difference in performance despite equipped with more RAM, it might be disappointing for those looking to some change in specs, but it will still do well for the average user who wants a smartphone that performs fine.

Software and User Experience

When Apple reported that the adoption of Android Nougat barely crossed the 10% mark in WWDC 2017, the Wiko Harry is thankfully one of that very few entry-level smartphones that comes shipped with Android Nougat out of the box, which is very commendable of the company, however like most entry-level smartphones, don’t expect the Harry to get an Android O update in the near future. Since we have already reviewed a number of Wiko smartphones, the software experience isn’t too different from other models, you still get the same paginated apps home screen, which can be eventually quite a pain to maintain if you have lots of apps installed, let alone the fact that you can’t resize the grid to fit in more icons and widgets. Therefore, I have been using a custom launcher during the review period, and I highly recommend Action Launcher 3.

Although Wiko’s software is rather limited when it comes to customization, it has proven to be just as reliable on the Harry, I haven’t experience any sudden app force closes on the phone, and apps will run just fine as long as you aren’t trying to multitask heavily on the device. One thing to note though, the Harry does tend to stutter a little when unlocking the device, and that annoys me at times when I really want to get to things quickly, this isn’t something that I have experienced on the U Feel Fab, which has the same performance internals as the Harry, let’s hope Wiko issues a software update to fix this issue.