Huawei Honor 6 – Quick Review

Huawei is one of those companies who have really set an example in the budget smartphone domain. WHile its true that their flagships are no less competent, its their budget lineup that works its magic when it comes to sale. After a barrage of successful devices in the low and mid range levels, Huawei has struck again with yet another upper mid range device, called the Huawei Honor 6.

The Honor 6 is a blend of High Performance hardware and low key design, at a price that’s frankly hard to beat. In a market segment where budget matters, the Honor 6 is offering some top-of-the-range specs to raise itself above the crowd.

The Honor 6 comes in an all glass body, which will instantly remind you of a certain Japanese Tech brand which uses the same design language on their phones. The biggest mystery however, is that , all Honor phones thus far have featured only the ‘ Honor ‘ badge, while there is absolutely no mention of Huawei on the device. Whatever marketing strategies are at play, the company’s expertise is undeniable and is surely carried over to the Honor 6.Just because the looks may not be unique, but if you take the effort of keeping it nice and clean, you will actually see that the device is a looker.

That said, its focus is clearly elsewhere. The device is aiming for a top spot on the bang-for-your-buck chart and on paper its outlook is more than promising. The phone packs a powerful home-brewed Kirin 920 chipset with an octa-core processor, backed up by a mouth watering 3GB of RAM. You get a 5 inch display which some consider the limit for pocketability, and it’s also a FullHD panel, so everything should be tack-sharp.

Imaging is duly covered both back and front. A 13MP main camera with dual-LED flash for the major photography occasions is backed by a 5MP wide angle font-facer for the selfies that just have to be posted and shared. Another solid spec is the battery capacity, where Huawei claims the 3100mAh unit will keep the Honor 6 going for two full days.

Enough of the build up – Lets dive straight into the device –

• Display – The Honor 6 comes with a 5-inch display of 1080p resolution. It takes advantage of the in-cell design, eliminating the additional touch-sensitive layer, and the image appears literally projected on the front glass. Viewing angles are great with the inevitable, but only marginal loss of contrast. That said, the text is still sharp on full zoom, Colors are vivid and accurately reproduced, but if you happen to differ, a color temperature adjustment slider lets you pick your poison. Sunlight legibility is not the greatest in class, due to the rather high reflectivity of the display, and in some cases low sunlight legibility can act as a big deal breaker.

• Connectivity – The Honor 6 has an array of connectivity options.It comes with quad-band GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz, dual-band 3G in the 900MHz and 2100 MHz bands and LTE 800 / 1800 / 2100 / 2600 MHz. LTE Cat.6 is supported for downlink speeds of up to 300Mbps.Local connectivity is well covered with dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n with DLNA and hotspot support. Bluetooth v4.0 is on board as well, and so is GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS. NFC and IR port have been included in the device, but there is no pre installed software for the latter, so you will have to head to the Play Store to get a suitable alternative, but that shouldn’t be a problem.

• Performance – The Honor 6 comes fully primed for war. It utilizes an in-house HiSilicon Kirin 920 chipset with an octa-core processor. The processor is based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture and uses four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores capable of working simultaneously. In the Honor 6, the Cortex-A15 cores are clocked at 1.7GHz, while the energy-efficient Cortex-A7 ones clock 1.3GHz.A somewhat dated Mali-T628 GPU is in charge of graphics, but should handle the 1080p resolution well enough as it has proven in the Exynos versions of the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 3. Huawei has been generous with the operating memory and the Honor 6 is equipped with a solid 3 gigs of RAM. By generous I mean 16/32 GB internal and 64 GB expansion level of generous. I would buy this device in a heartbeat just looking at the performance and memory packages.

• Camera – The Honor 6 comes with a 13MP main camera, which shoots images up to 4,160 x 3,120 pixels in resolution. The lens is flanked by a dual-LED flash.The photo quality is good and even does well under low light modes as well as panorama mode.There’s no dedicated macro mode, but the camera senses what you’re up to, and adjusts accordingly. It was able to lock focus from extremely close distance and its position is such, that lighting your subject shouldn’t be an issue.  A 5 MP sensor takes care of the Selfie department with total mmastery. The images are good enough to be shared with your peers without visiting an editing software first.The Honor 6 is capable of shooting video up to 1080p at 30fps and lacks more fancy modes as 4K or high frame rate recording. The front camera supports resolution up to 720p, perfectly adequate for video calls. The interface is shared with the still camera and if you have that set up in 4:3 ratio, you’ll need to adjust your framing.

• Battery – The battery in the Huawei Honor 6 has a more than good enough 3100mAh capacity. The smartphone is more than adequately powered, and Huawei is keen to point out that it will last two days on a single charge.And they are not lying. The combined rating of 67 hours means that if you do an hour of 3G calls, web browsing and video playback per day, the Honor 6 will almost make it to three entire days of usage.What is equally impressive is that the web browsing rating which falls just shy of 13 hours!!

Overall, The Huawei Honor 6 makes a great first impression with a strong spec sheet, packed with all the right ingredients. The design may not be the most innovative of the lot, maybe even a knock off of the Xperia lineup, but that does not stop the device performing like the beast it is meant to be. So, again, design notwithstanding, I will give this phone, a big Thumbs Up.