Initially marketed in China as the "Glory 6", the smartphone we international-market-folk would call the "Honor 6" made its way to the UK last October. Taiwanese telecom manufacturer Huawei has been prolific of late, rolling out European releases of its Ascend Mate 7 and Ascend P7 smartphones. But contrary to these high-end models, the Honor 6—built by Huawei's pet mobile brand, Honor—is a mid-range phone that puts the focus on design and configuration
The Honor 6 has some impressive hardware considering its price: a 5-inch Full HD IPS display, a home-made Kirin 920 system-on-chip that boasts four 1.3 GHz cores and four 1.7 GHz cores, 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB of onboard memory, a microSD card slot for up to 64 GB more storage, a 13-Megapixel camera, a 3100 mAh non-removable battery and 4G+ (Cat 6) connectivity. The operating system is Android 4.4 KitKat with Huawei's own user interface, Emotion UI, on top.
DESIGN & HANDLING
This is an elegant, low-key phone with a stylish design and practically impeccable manufacturing. It may not be all that original—Huawei clearly took a liking for the iPhone 6—but it looks good. The body's all plastic, but it doesn't feel or seem cheap. Quite the contrary, actually. The assembly is flawless, the only exception being the cover for the SIM and microSD card slots, which wiggles every so slightly.
The screen takes up 72% of the façade, leaving less than 3 mm of bezel on either side. That makes for a nice bezel/screen ratio that optimises the space well and provides good handling for the screen size. But they still could have whittled it down above and below the display. The navigation buttons are integrated into the touchscreen, so there's no need for all that space below. The surface collects smudges pretty easily, and since it's a light phone (130 g), the glossy surface makes it slip-and-slide in your hand.
The body heats up just a smidgen when you've been using it intensively for a long time, but no more than you'd expect from any phone, including the best.
DISPLAY
The 5" display is fitted with an LTPS panel, which are known for great LCD performance and lower power use than other LCD technologies. The picture quality is impressive, with wide-open viewing angles. The contrast is satisfactory (868:1), a bit less than the Ascend P7's (891:1), but both are much lower than smartphones like the LG G2 (1332:1) or Google Nexus 5 (1046:1). Sort of like what Samsung does with its AMOLED phones, Huawei gave users the ability to adjust the colours. They're pretty lively by default, but the primary colours, greys and flesh tones look quite natural.
The touchscreen has a 19 ms ghosting time, which is slow compared to several rivals, but still in the upper-average for an IPS panel. It has a respectable 76 ms touch response time, so it's quick to recognise your touch commands.
Here's a tip: Try switching the resolution to 720p. You honestly probably won't notice the difference, and it helps the processor save energy, prolonging the battery life and improving performance in games.
INTERFACE & NAVIGATION
The operating system is Android KitKat, and a Lollipop update is in the works for early 2015. But the thing you have to know about Huawei phones is that the user interface, Emotion, alters Android practically beyond recognition. Stock fans won't feel at home, and the difference is more than visual. For instance, there's no app drawer. Instead, all of your apps are located right on the home screens, like in iOS, where you can arrange them and group them into folders. That said, it's a fun, user-friendly way of doing things. The Phone Manager app shows you which background apps are using the most resources; it's also where you can clear the cache and block calls from people you don't like.
The interface is pretty classic in terms of design, but it offers a good deal of customisation for themes, wallpapers, icon sizes and transitions. The favourites section in the app bar at the bottom of the screen is also customisable.
Huawei's octa-core processor uses big.LITTLE architecture with a 1.3 GHz Cortex A7 quad-core and a 1.7 GHz Cortex A15 quad-core, between which the phone juggles depending on the task at hand. The idea being to save power by using the smaller cores for smaller tasks and the bigger cores for bigger tasks, thereby prolonging the battery life. In terms of performance and user experience, there isn't much to criticise here. Everything runs perfectly smoothly on the home pages, online and in apps, making the Honor 6 an enjoyable phone to use. That said, the architecture could have been better optimised for gaming and graphics, as we're about to see...
MULTIMEDIA
Given the screen's size and picture quality, videos and video games naturally look great. Unfortunately, games that are particularly demanding and that contain a lot of graphical content begin to lag here and there. And the detail isn't always perfect. Let's just say that lighter-weight games like Angry Birds run just fine, but the Honor 6 clearly can't compete with higher-end phones that more or less double as handheld consoles, such as the LG G3, Samsung Galaxy S5 or Sony Xperia Z3.
The speaker is located on the back, right where your hand covers it when you're holding the phone...
The sound quality is, how to say... not good. It's pretty inconsistent via the headphone jack, with extremely low distortion (0.005%) and excellent dynamics (90 dB separating the highest and lowest sounds), but the power is so low that the average portable headphones will only get enough volume to cover ambient noise. The built-in speaker essentially reproduces highs and high-mids and nothing else, and there's a good dose of saturation and medium-level power. On a positive note, voices are intelligible through the speaker.
CAMERA
With its 13-Megapixel image sensor and f/2.0 lens, the Honor 6 isn't bad at photography. The autofocus is quick and relatively precise (but has trouble dealing with low light) and the app is fun to use and has tons of options for refocusing and whatnot. HDR mode isn't the most effective one out there, and it has a tendency to overexpose.
The picture quality is satisfactory, with uniformity across the frame, faithful colours and generally sharp images, although there's too much smoothing for our taste. You don't get much detail in low light, though, and there's a good deal of noise. May we recommend against using the double LED flash, which tends to blow out subjects. Videos are fluid, but they're low in detail because there's no image stabilisation.
BATTERY LIFE
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