Huawei Honor 6 Plus review – excellent camera!

Huawei Honor 6 Plus is upgraded version of Honor 6 and it is another smartphone that comes with dual cameras on the rear. Honor 6 Plus is powered by octa core processor running KitKat over a 5.5 inch screen with FHD resolution.

Honor 6 Plus Unboxing
Inside you will find the handset, data cable, travel charger (5V ~ 2A), user guide, warranty card and two screen guards one for the front and other for the back.

Design and Display
The Huawei Honor 6 Plus comes with a very good build quality and finishing. Though the body is made of good quality plastic it gives you the metal feel. The sides are sliver colored with metallic finish and the body is black. Rear side has got nice textures with a glass layer over it. It is not clearly mentioned if the screen comes with gorilla glass protection, however the front screen does look scratch resistant to some extent but the rear side is definitely not.

I got the review unit from the company, I guess it was already been used before, there was a small dent on the right top side and I can clearly see the scratches on the rear and surprisingly hardly any on the front screen. So the first thing you would want to do is put the screen guard on the rear side.

Even though its glass on the front and the back, you still get a very good grip and handset is not that slippery. Weight with battery is 167 grams and dimensions are 75.76 x 150.39 x 7.64 (mm).

The power button, volume rocker, micro SD tray and Micro SIM tray are placed on the right side. Micro USB port and primary mic is placed at the bottom and audio jack, IR blaster and secondary mic is placed on the top.

This is a single SIM handset with 4G support. The micro SD card tray has a text on it ‘Nano / SD’ however if you insert Nano SIM instead of micro SD card it does not work – so this is a single SIM handset and it works via SIM slot 1 only.

Honor 6 Plus sports a 5.5 inch IPS OGS screen with 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution. Color reproduction, viewing angles and touch response are very good.

There is LED notification and following sensors – accelerometer, gyro, magnetic, light, hall and proximity. Native video calling is not supported.

Memory, Storage and OS
The handset is packed with 3GB RAM and 32GB storage. On the first boot you will get around 25GB space for apps and 1.9GB free RAM. OTG is supported. Apps are getting installed on internal storage but there is option to move some apps to external storage (gaming data is stored on internal storage).

Honor 6 Plus is running Emotion UI 3.0 based on Android 4.4.2.

Performance
6 Plus is using the HiSilicon Kirin 925 octa core processor using the big.LITTLE 4x cortex A7 @ 1.3 + 4x cortex A15 @ 1.8GHz chipset coupled with Mali T624 GPU. The chipset used is slightly different from as seen on the Huawei Honor 6 handset. Performance is smooth and lag free. Handset does heat up with heavy usage but temp is well controlled.

Benchmark

Gaming
I played Asphalt 8, this game got installed on the internal storage, game play was very smooth and lag free. Hardware is powerful and can play many high end games, though the apps are getting installed on the internal storage there is plenty of space.

Camera
The camera is the best thing on the Honor 6 Plus. There are dual cameras on the rear with dual LED flash. In photo mode you can shoot images in 13MP resolution and in dual camera mode / Wide aperture mode you can shoot images in 8MP (lens 1) + 8MP (lens 2) resolution. Camera quality is awesome. You can control the exposure – tap the screen you will get the focus circle and move finger up and down to adjust exposure.

In Wide Aperture mode you can shoot first and focus later on. You can change the aperture and the focus point. The output is awesome almost similar to as you get on a DSLR camera. The file size is also pretty small at around 5MB.

The editing tool is integrated into the camera app and gallery app. So for all the photos shot in Wide Aperture mode you will find the editing icon, tap it and you can alter the image (focus / aperture as needed). Once done it will save the changes in the same image / file (it does not create a new file) – you can re-edit the image again (anytime).

There is one more interesting feature called the super night mode. It is better to use the tripod in this mode. In Super Night mode the camera will shoot for few seconds (14 to 22) and create awesome image. If there is some activity during that time for example (shooting at night) a vehicle with headlight on in motion, you will find the path glowing with the light –such effects are possible using professional cameras.

This handset can record FHD videos at 30fps. Front camera is of 8MP resolution. Check the sample images and videos at the end of this review.

Others
Sound is load and clear, in-call sound is also clear. This handset comes with DTS mode. There is Karaoke effects that works only when headset is connected.

4G worked I am using Airtel 4G in Mumbai (2300), no issues found with Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC and Bluetooth. There is IR blaster but no pre-installed apps related to it.

Battery
This smartphone comes packed with 3600 mAh non-removable battery. Battery backup is decent you can expect about 3 to 5 hours of continuous moderate to heavy usage on a single charge. I got over 24 hours of mixed usage.

Verdict
The Huawei Honor 6 Plus is powerful, its single SIM with 4G support. Performance is smooth without any lags. Handset is running KitKat not sure if it will get Lollipop update. Gaming performance is very good and the best part is the camera. Camera is just awesome.

This handset does come for a price of ₹26,499. A good buy if you are really looking for, kind of DSLR type of output from a mobile phone.

Huawei Honor 6 Plus is priced at ₹26,499.

Image Gallery

Honor 6 Plus video review