Off late we have seen a hell lot of smartphones of various handset marketers all of whom are vying to get the attention of Diwali shoppers. Huawei too has joined the league with its Honor 6 which is available from an online shopping portal (it will not be made available in physical stores) for Rs 19,999.
Here is an analysis of the Honor 6 which will give you a clear idea as in which category does it fall – worth considering or should be ignored.
On paper
Huawei Honor 6 offers a 5 inch display, the latest Android 4.4.2 Kitkat operating system, HiSilicon Kirin 920 octa core processor, Mali T628 MP6 GPU and 3 GB RAM.
The Honor 6 comes in 16 and 32 GB storage versions and has a micro SD card slot that can accommodate up to a 64 GB card. There is a 13 megapixel auto focus camera and two LED flash lights in its rear panel while a 5 megapixel camera is in its front.
The Honor 6 has a single SIM slot and it is compatible with Indian 4G network. Other than that, the Honor 6 has Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, WiFi with Hotspot feature, DLNA, and a micro USB 2.0 port. It has a 3100 mAh Li-Po battery.
Needless to say, the Honor 6 looks attractive at Rs 19,999. But specification and price of a smartphone cannot be the only parameters for choosing your next buy. So, let’s put the Honor 6 on the operation table and see if it survives day to day activities.
Look & Feel
Huawei Honor 6 has glass covering on both its front and rear panels. It has a metallic strip that covers all its sides except the bottom panel. Also despite having a 5 inch display, the phone is surprisingly light and compact, you can operate the phone with one hand too (ofcourse for that you need big palms).
The micro SIM and the micro SD slots are placed on the left panel and are covered with a plastic flap. On the right panel, it has the power on/off button and volume rocker and in the bottom and top panel we have micro USB 2.0 port and 3.5mm Audio Jack respectively.
In the front panel of Honor 6, there is a 5 megapixel camera along with earpiece surrounded by a notification LED and ambient sensor. In the back, it has a 13 megapixel camera with dual LED flash on top and a mono speaker grill at the bottom. The brand name, Honor, is printed just above the speaker grill.
Some of my colleagues were of the opinion that the Honor 6 resembles Sony Xperia Z while other equated with Apple’s iPhone. But for me it is closer to Sony Xperia Z, in terms of looks, than iPhone. Nonetheless, the Honor 6 has a decent design though it does not have any extraordinary element that can differentiate it from others. Also, owing to its glass body, it is a bit slippery and the problem would be more severe for persons with sweaty palms.
All in all, the Huawei Honor 6 has a design which will not stand out in a crowd but will not be lost in the crowd either. One can use a flip cover for better grip.
Display and UI
As mentioned above, Honor 6 comes with a 5-inch LCD display with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolution, thereby offering Pixel density of 445 pixels per inch. But it isn’t an IPS panel so one cannot have a perfect viewing experience from all the angles.
We were quite satisfied with the display quality of Honor 6 and even in bright sunlight, the display’s output was acceptable. Two interesting display features of Honor 6 is colour temperature settings and screen saving mode -these features allows you change colour setting as per your need and activate screen saving mode in case you are running on low battery to limit power consumption. We can safely say Huawei has done a decent job with display screen considering what other smartphones are offering in the price bracket of Honor 6.
Camera
For imaging enthusiasts, the Huawei Honor 6 has a 13 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front camera. The camera App has modes like HDR, Beauty, Night, Panorama, HDR, Beauty and all-focus. It also does lets you adjust the exposure, saturation and contrast manually.
The picture quality of the rear camera in auto mode in bright sunlight and decent lighting conditions was quite good though on couple of occasions I felt detailing was not there. Even in low light picture quality was decent with little noise. The only issue we faced was while capturing pictures in HDR mode where we had to click multiple pictures before getting a decent click. As far as the front camera is concerned we really enjoyed using it for taking selfies.
To summarise, I would say if you are taking close up shots or capturing subjects which are at a distance of 6-10 feets pictures will be really good but do click them in decent lighting. On the other hand long distance shots with just 50 per cent zoom will give satisfactory result. I feel camera could have been better.
Performance
Huawei Honor 6 has an impressive combination of an octa core processor, Mali T628MP4 GPU and 3GB RAM. Through out the review process, I had had no issues with its performance. It managed to open apps quite quickly and had no problem whatsoever in playing games like Asphalt 8 and Riptide GP 2. Also while multitasking with resource intensive apps running in the background, Honor 6 showed no lag or signs of heating up.
Huawei has placed its own Emotion UI 2.3 on the Honor 6 which removes the App drawer functionality and places all apps in the home screen itself.
Honor 6 also comes with couple of good pre-loaded apps and widgets that can block unwanted calls, enhance battery life, jazz up the display.
Battery Back Up
Huawei Honor 6 has a 3000 mAh battery and that is one of the strong points of this device. In one instance, when we used the smartphone while keeping the WiFi and 3G on along with watching 15 minutes of video, 45 minutes of calling, 15 minutes of gaming and surfing web for 1 hour we were able to get 1.5 days of power backup on a single charge.
Here I would also like to mention that through the supplied adapter I was able to charge the device from 0 to 100 per cent in two hours. Overall I was impressed with the battery performance of Honor 6 and was never left high and dry after a day’s hectic usage.
Images by Sushil Kumar