After launching it in China last year, Chinese-handset manufacturer, Huawei, today unveiled its new smartphone – the Honor 6X at the CES 2017. The smartphone comes with a price tag of $249 (approx. Rs 17,000) and sports a dual-camera set up at the back for advanced bokeh effect and shallow depth of field. Although the device hasn’t hit the Indian market as yet, we expect it to happen by the end of this month. We have been using the device for quite some time now and here is our first impression of the Huawei Honor 6X.
Box Contents
The packaging of the Honor 6X is no different from the original Honor 6. Opening up the box, you will find the device sitting on the top underneath which you get some device literature including the user manual and warranty statement and a SIM ejector tool. Digging more will get you microUSB cable for data syncing and charging along with an adaptor which is 5V ~ 2A.
Design & Display
Starting with the design, Honor 6X comes with a beautiful aluminium unibody design. The back curves around the edges making the device easy to hold in hands, however, it does tend to make it for a slippery experience. For the quick physical overview, the back of the device features a dual-camera setup, a LED flash, a fingerprint sensor along with some Honor branding. On the top, we get the 3.5 mm Headphone jack and the secondary microphone. At the bottom, we get two speaker grills of which one acts as a microphone. On the right side, we have the volume rockers and the power button and on the left, we get the hybrid Dual SIM tray. We don’t get off-screen touch capacitive buttons and the front of the device also boasts some sensors, earpiece and the 8-megapixel front facing camera just above the screen. We also get some more Honor branding at the bottom. During our brief testing of the device, Honor 6X felt solid and premium. The display at the front is 2.5D curved giving it an, even more, premium feel while using the device. Coming to the display, the Honor 6X features a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS LCD display. The display looked decent and bright and the colour seemed to be accurate with impressive touch response.
Performance and UI
Although it is too early to comment on the performance of this device, nevertheless, the Honor 6X boasts a Kirin 655 octa-core (4 cores at 2.1GHz + 4 cores at 1.7GHz) Chipset with Mali-T830MP2 GPU paired with 3GB RAM + 32GB internal storage or 4GB RAM + 64GB internal storage. The storage is expandable up to 256GB in both cases via micro SD card. The device runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Huawei’s Emotion UI v4.1 on top. In the time we had the device, we experienced no hiccups or lags navigating through the User Interface. As far as the user interface (UI) is concerened, there is nothing new in the Emotion UI 4.1. As we get the same layout with no App drawers, quick toggles on the right of the notification shade. Jumping into the settings, we see a bunch of customizations like the ability to change the colour temperature of the display, a more simplified home screen for easy navigation for aged or people who have difficulty using the regular home screen style. We did try the fingerprint sensor and found it to be pretty quick even on standby mode. The smartphone does come with some pre-loaded apps but the good part is most of them are removable. Apart from that, we get the Health app which continuously counts the number of steps you have walked through a day. There is also HiCare to provide you easy access to customer care and service center. We are yet to test out the device rigorously and recommend you to stay tuned on our website for detailed review.
Camera
Now for the optics, things get a little interesting.The Honor 6X sports a dual-camera set up at the back with a combination of a 12-megapixel sensor and a 2-megapixel sensor. The set up comes with phase detection Autofocus (PDAF), LED flash etc. At the front, there is an 8-megapxel sensor for selfies. The rear camera setup on the Honor 6X is more like the one we saw in HTC One M8. The set up lets you dig into and play with shallow depth of field and one can change the focus of an image post clicking it. We did snap some photos from the rear camera set up and was really impressed. The camera managed to capture some impressive amount of lighting in low-light however, we would highly recommend you to wait until we are out with our detailed camera testing of this device. The front camera performed decent as well and does boast a slightly Wide-Angle lens.
Battery and Connectivity
On paper, the Honor 6X is packed with a 3340 mAh battery which, as per our prediction, should give a decent full day of usage. For the connectivity, we get the usual Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.1, GPS with A-GPS, microUSB 2.0 and hybrid Dual SIM slot.