Huawei has been in the Indian market for a long time. Over the years, company has released steady stream of smartphones that were value for money. But for some indefinite reasons, they have been struggling for limelight. Will the brand’s new flagship create an impact among the high-end smartphones? Let’s find out.
Design
First talk about the design. TheHonor 6 sports a Unibody design with aluminum alloy frame and a plastic finish. The bezels surrounding the display are quite thin, making the phone quite comfortable for one-handed use. Above the screen, there is a slim metallic grill, which functions as the earpiece. Complimented by the front-camera on the right, and the sensors and led notifications on the left. The bottom part is completely bear as the Android buttons overlay in the display software. The uniform chrome bezel runs over all edges. At the top, company has provided the 3.5mm jack, the secondary microphone and the IR blaster. While the left edge is empty, you will find the volume rocker, power key and the flap for microSIM and microSD card on the right edge. The bottom sports same white finish seen on the rest of the smartphone. And features a microUSB port, along with the primary microphone. Moving over to the back, you will find primary camera with dual LED flash. And the vertical grill, representing the loudspeaker at the bottom. The shiny back panel gets smudged and scratched easily. Here we wished; Huawei would have opted for a matte finish plastic instead.
Display
Next up is a display on the Honor 6. The 5-inch 1080p display is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 and oleophobic coating, to keep fingerprints at bay. The display is bright, extremely sharp and very responsive as it was a delight to use. It’s equally good for gaming, watching videos and typing with no lags at all. The viewing angles are quite good enough to see true colors from most of the angles.
Hardware/Performance
Handling the processing on Honor 6 is the Octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 920 chipset developed by Huawei. It is complimented by Mali-2628 Graphics and 3GB of RAM. The device has 16GB of internal storage, out of which around 11GB of storage is available to use. The microSD card supports expansion of up to 64GB. The IR blaster on the device will allow you to control infrared enabled devices. With these set of specs, the Honor 6 is blazingly fast, handling intensive task and basic functions without stopping for a breath. The heavy games like Riptide GP2 are the delight to play, with a Full HD screen making it a visual treat. Relying on the 3100mAh battery, the phone easily last for a day with heavy usage.
Software
As for the software, the Honor 6 runs on the Huawei’s Emotion UI 2.3 on top of Android 4.4.2 Kitkat OS. The new Emotion UI features a completely redesigned interface. A key feature is its Magazine unlock mechanism, which offers a dynamic experience on the lock screen. As it shows professionally unlocked photos every time, when you wake up the device. There is no app drawer, so all the icons are displayed on the home screen itself. The icons and widgets are colorful, and the good news is that you are not stuck with a single look. You can adorn the Honor 6 with these beautifully designed themes. The notification shade has shortcut stuff for quick settings, while the recent apps button has a one-touch RAM cleaner. An interesting app called Phone Manager functions up like the dashboard for various functions on the phone. There’s a virus scanner, harassment filter and a Do not disturb feature. The Phone accelerator shows you which apps are consuming a lot of memory. The tools folder contains all the utility apps, including some interesting apps like a mirror and magnifier app. The Simple Home screen mode is similar to the Lite mode seen on the Xiaomi’s MIUI as well as Sony has too. It turns your home screen into easy to use interface with big icons.
Camera
Coming to the Camera. The Honor 6 is well equipped in the photography department with 13MP Sony BSI and Dual LED flash at the back. While the front snapper is 5MP. Both the cameras performed reasonably well but didn’t blow us away with results. The rear shooter takes good macro and night shots. But landscape images result in washed out colors. The front snapper has a handy selfie window to ensure that you are looking directly at the camera. The All Focus feature is pretty interesting, as it allows you to refocus the photos taken.
Cons
The major issue with the device is that it heats up very quickly. While streaming videos on Youtube for less than 5 minutes, the device heated up a lot. That makes it uncomfortable to use the device as the experience was similar when we played games like Riptide GP2 and Asphalt. Another thing that I didn’t like is that there is no App drawer on the Emotion UI, making it difficult to manage the apps. As well as there is too much bloatware added by the Huawei.
Verdict
The Honor 6 has pretty high-end features including a 1080p display, Octa-core processor, and a long battery life. Overall the performance of the device was great over the weeks of usage. For the price of INR 20K, the device appears to be worthy. But currently there are few competitors in the market claiming to give this handset a tough fight.
