Huawei Honor 6 review

The Honor 6's crisp, bright display makes videos and pictures look great, its octa-core processor will handle anything you're likely to throw at it, and its price tag is extremely reasonable.

The Huawei Android skin makes some big changes to the platform, which some will find frustrating to live with, and the phone itself feels slightly cheap.

Its software might not be perfect, but the Honor 6 packs an impressive lineup of specs for a brilliant price. If you want the crisp screen and fast speeds of the top-end phones but don't fancy the price tag, the Honor 6 is a great phone to go for.

Design and display

The Honor 6 is most easily described as a cheaper-looking iPhone 4. It has a black glass front and back, with a metallic strip running around the edge, separating the two panels. That strip is metallic plastic, rather than metal, meaning it doesn't have the same luxurious feel as the iPhone 4. There's a definite plastic feeling to the phone, which isn't helped by that band , up close it loses any chance of pretending to be metal. It's certainly not among the most luxurious phones around, but it's difficult to mark it down for that, given the price premium phones like the HTC One M8, iPhone 6 and Galaxy Alpha all cost hundreds of pounds more than the Honor 6.

 

The glass back at least makes the phone look pretty sleek from a distance. At launch, Honor boasted about the back panel's "dazzling, 3D diamond back", which is "inspired by nature". Quite apart from the fact that "inspired by nature" was Samsung's tagline for the Galaxy S3, the back panel just looks plain black -- only under the brightest sunlight at the right angle could I make out the faintest pattern. With a 5-inch screen stuffed inside, it's not a small phone. It has a fairly narrow bezel though, so the body hasn't needed to stretch out too much to accommodate the large display.

It's comfortable to hold in one hand, although you'll realistically need two hands in order to type properly. It has 16GB of built-in storage and there's a microSD card slot on the side to expand that further. Speaking of the screen, that's a full-HD (1,920x1,080-pixel) panel, which is a very impressive resolution for a phone at this price. It results in a pixel density of 440 pixels per inch, which casually beats theiPhone 6 (326ppi), the Samsung Galaxy Alpha (312ppi) and the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact (319ppi). It even trumps the Galaxy S5's 432ppi screen.

Unsurprisingly, text under icons, on Web pages and in magazines looked crisp and high-resolution photos looked great too. It's bright enough to counter the worst of our overhead office lights, it's got decent viewing angles and it has strong colours too. The colour temperature is pretty even, but you can tweak this in the settings menu if you like things to look a little warmer.

Android software and processor

The phone arrives with Android 4.4.2 KitKat on board, which is now a few versions out of date. On a top-end phone this would be a major negative, but with the lower price, I'm more happy to forgive it. You also won't be able to tell that it's not bang up to date, as Honor has used the same Android skin you'll find on Huawei phones, which dramatically changes the look of the software. The biggest change is that there's no app tray, so every app you download will be kept on the multiple home screens.

I'm not keen on this as it can make the phone very cluttered unless you take a strict approach to the layout. This isn't helped by the fact there's quite a lot of bundled extras cluttering up the place. Various games like Bubble Bash Mania and Real Football 2015 are already on board, as well as apps like Kingsoft Office and Bitcasa. I suggest uninstalling everything you can and starting with only the apps you really want.

The app icons and menu layouts are different too and there are different themes you can choose from to alter the colour schemes. The lock screen has been tweaked too, giving instant access to media controls, a calculator and a torch -- although these won't be available if you have a PIN set to unlock your phone. It's running on an octa-core processor, made up of two quad-core chips clocked at 1.3GHz and 1.7GHz respectively, backed up by 3GB of RAM. That's an impressive engine, even for a high-end phone, let alone one with a budget-focused price. 

It achieved a very healthy score of 4,272 on the Geekbench test, putting it alongside the Galaxy Alpha's score of 4,350. It didn't do as well on the Quadrant test, however, achieving 11,734 -- less than half the 23,729 the Alpha achieved on the same test. Benchmark tests aren't always an accurate representation of how a device performs though. In general use, I found it to be perfectly swift. Glossy racer Asphalt 8 played very smoothly, Netflix movies streamed well and swiping around the colourful interface was met with a minimum of lag and delay.

The elegant thing about the Huawei Honor 6 is that it sports sturdy aluminum frame, which facilitates heat dissipation - an important feat, considering that Huawei equips the handset with its brand new octa-coreKirin 920 processor that comes with four powerful Cortex-A15 cores, paired with four Cortex-A7 ones, and and embeds a fast Mali-T628 GPU. The chipset also has integrated LTE modem, and theoretically supports up to 300 Mbps download speeds, if your carrier provides those, of course.

These specs put Kirin 920 on equal footing with the upcoming Snapdragon 805, and Huawei's boss actually bragged that the company's homegrown processor is even more powerful than Qualcomm's creation, but we'll see about that. Furthermore, the Honor 6 sports 3 GB of RAM, 16/32 GB of storage, expandable via a microSD card, and a 13 MP camera on the back, plus a 5 MP front-facing shooter.

The Huawei Honor 6 is comes with 13 megapixel rear-facing camera and 5 megapixel front-facing camera, the main camera has f/2.0 aperture which uses Sony camera sensor. This phone is running with Huawei Emotion UI 2.3 based on Android 4.4.2 KitKat operating system. The phone is also powering up with 3,100 mAh battery capacity.

The new Huawei Honor 6 is using 5.0 inch that has 1080p screen resolution, the screen material is produce by JDI if you think the 5.0inch screen size is too big, you’re wrong because today the big screen is the new trends for most flagship smartphone, the big screen smartphone is now more acceptable by the user. The new Huawei Honor 6 is has 2.86mm ultra-narrow border, accounting for up to 75.7% of the screen, the whole body is very compact. Screen covering the third generation of Corning Glass, the ability to enhance anti-scratch, anti-fingerprint coating layer.

Honor is owned and operated by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Although not a separate company at all, Honor will apparently operate as though it is. To prove that, here's its first phone. It's called the Honor 6 and it has a full-HD 5-inch display, an octa-core processor, a 13-megapixel camera and cat 6 LTE, which promises speeds of up to 300Mbps if your local networks support it.