Honor 6, my personal review

mdabar

Huawei is chinese brand well known for almost anyone thanks to network components like routers, modems, switches...presents in our homes since the ADSL started to be something common.

However, in the last years they have go into newer markets to avoid stay behind their competitors, and that’s how they went into the mobile market with some smartphones and tablets... Although not attracting too much attention.

In order to change that trend, they have introduced a new business line under the commercial name “Honor” which flagship is the new Honor 6. It has been presented as an independent brand from Huawei, but with the backup of having such a big brand behind, something like what we can see with Toyota and Lexus on the cars world.

The most peculiar of this new brand is that they promise high specifications but at a quite reduced prices, basing their strategy on online sales. Same technique used by low cost Asiatic manufacturers or, even first brands like Google with their Nexus.

Specifications

The characteristics showed on their web... are simply amazing. There are no doubts we are facing a very powerful terminal, last generation and equipped with octa-core processor and 3GB of RAM!… Now let’s see how it performs.

We see each time more and more devices with amazing HW on the paper BUT, with always or almost always the same weak points on the real using experience: screen quality and low camera definition on low light situations, even having a lot of megapixels. So go on with the review step by step.

Design

Frontal and rear part come with the 3rd generation of Gorilla Glass , connected by a plastic surface on the sides... Willing to look like metal (but not giving high quality feeling). Clean and round lines not highlighting for anything in special... Unless we mention the unavoidable similarity with the iPhone 5: same round edges, power adaptor situation or the frontal speaker.

I must say here that the finish is so smooth that I found the same issue the Nokia C7 had... It slides from the hands almost automatically.

On the front, first thing we see is that amazing 5.0” IPS (with 441ppp) with the forementioned speaker on the top together with the 5Mpx secondary camera. The tactile controls are located just below the screen. With this distribution, they have reached a quite impressive 76% ratio of screen within the total surface.

Once turned back, the 13Mpx main camera (with a Sony IMX214 sensor, 1/3.06”, f/2.0, 28mm including Total Focus and software stabilizer, HDR) and dual LED flash. Looking down, only the hands free speaker is visible. Near the center of the cover only the Honor logo to get more value.
Regarding this part of the design, I must pull the engineer’s ears for putting that rear speaker compeltely flat, in a way that when we recline the device, the sound is completely absorbed...losing quality and volume.

Interior

A Kirin 920 octa-core processor with four Cortex A15 cores running at 1,7Ghz and other four cores Cortex A7 at 1,3Ghz is beating inside this Honor 6, accompanied by a Mali T628 MP4 GPU (at 600Mhz) and as mentioned above, 3GB of RAM!
The internal memory brings us the very decent amount of 32GB, and again with the option to expand them with a microSD card, up to 64GB. Bravo for Huawei/Honor guys being able to answer a bigger storage demand.

Running, performance and autonomy

This Honor 6 presents us Android 4.4 Kitkat, customized with Emui 2.3. Sincerely it’s not enough to take advantage of the great hardware on this device, however it is already possible to update to the version 3.0 of Emui bringing interesting things to users, and specially using better the phone capabilities.

We have already seen the Sony IMX214 sensor of the main camera in many different high-end smartphones like OnePlus One, Nexus 6 or Xiaomi Mi4. Nevertheless, using the same components doesn’t mean achieving the same results...

A little subsection here to talk about the number of megapisels and the quality of the pictures taken. We all know that the iPhones (even the latest ones) still mount an 8Mpx camera, while their direct competitors have already jumped to the13Mpx or even 20Mpx. This could be translated into worse pictures or customers complaining, however the company from Cupertino has shown to followers and retractors that the software behind the camera is almost as important as the sensor used, receiving in addition a lot of praises for the quality of night pictures and the incredibly speed they are taken.

That said, it’s obvious I have found some faults to Honor 6’s camera. In the same way other (most of) low-cost smartphones in the market, we can take outstanding pictures in very good light conditions but, when the light is poor (or in the night) and we must use the flash, we find a lot of nois in the pictures due to the increase on the ISO sensibility.

Recording 1080p video at 30fps shows a good quality, and the optic stabilizer helps a lot for that purpose, in exchange to limit the camera capabilities, since we know this sensor is capable of recording at 4K at 30fps. Summarizing, the video recording is very good, although we have the impression we have been cut on the hardware benefits.

The stock application for the camera offer basic controls, sincerely more than enough for most of users and, if someone needs more control voer some elements...there are lots of third-party applications on Google Play.

It is not a secret that the recent selfie fever makes the secondary camera become a main character. About this one, I can only say that having 5Mps work in a similar way than the rear camera, so great results with good light, and noisy ones with low-light. Remark the included “beauty effect” filter will be quite useful when taking those selfies.

When talking about the performance on this Honor 6, the only I can say is fluid and fast on every task we charge him with: browsing (wifi, 3G or 4G), productivity (email, WPS Office,...), multimedia (HD movies without lags) or games (once more Asphalt 8 comes included and runs perfectly).

About the battery, brings 3100 mAh, more than enough for standing more than one full day with standard/intensive use.
It includes also an energy saving tool, proven quite useful with a lot of tweaks available.
And again I must give a shout to the engineers, premium range and not including the fast charge system? Please! It would be great to charge 90% of this battery in 15 minutes.

I am not following the trend of pasting screen-shots of amazing benchmarks results, like AnTuTu and others, since every smartphone today will bring very high scores and this not always mean a great user experience.

Conclusions

A very balanced terminal on every field, some initial complaints that are solved with Emui update, and surely with Lollipop.
The price of this smartphone with the new configuration (32GB ROM and up to 64GB by adding a microSD) is not even 330€, in online shops like Etotalk, including the VIP shipping via DHL (door to door). What makes of it a very interesting option