Huawei Honor 6 review – Octa core with 4G support

If you are looking for a powerful handset with 4G support under Rs. 20K, the Huawei Honor 6 could fit in perfectly. It is Octa Core powered but using a different chipset. The Honor 6 comes with a single SIM slot with 4G/3G/2G support. It is priced at Rs. 19,999.

Box Pack
The box packing is pretty slim. Inside you will get the handset, two screen guards – one for the front screen and other for the back panel, travel charger, data cable, user guide and warranty card. Earphone is not included. SAR Value : 1.070 W/kg.

Design
The handset is light weight and easy to handle. The rear has got glossy finish and comes with a glass layer, in fact the back panel looks even better than the front, had it not been for the logo and the camera on the back, one would have mistaken it for the front screen.  The front screen is scratch restraint to some extent, for normal handling you really don’t need the screen guard. But on the back, better put up the screen guard. I had hardly used the handset (for review) and already started seeing some minor scratches on the back glass.

Weight is 134 grams with battery and dimensions are 69.89mm x 139.69mm x 7.63mm. This smartphone is with a premium build quality and finishing. The handset is sealed, battery is built in. The metallic grey side run all the way except at the bottom.

Power button and volume rockers are on the right side. Audio jack, mic and IR blaster are placed on the top. Micro USB port and another mic is placed at the bottom. Below the power button there is a packed slot that when opened will reveal the single micro SIM slot and a micro SD card slot.

The handset has a glossy finish on both front and back, it gives a good grip but could turn slippery for some (with sweaty palms).

Display
the Huawei Honor 6 sports a 5 inch screen with FHD resolution. There are no dedicated navigation buttons and hence onscreen navigation buttons will consume some area on the screen (in general the screen resolution becomes 1776 x 1080 pixels).

Touch is very, very smooth and responsive. Viewing angles and colour reproduction are also very good. There is LED notification (green / orange colour). This handset comes with accelerometer, magnetic, light, proximity, gyro and hall sensors plus Huawei step counter.

Memory, Storage and OS
There is 3GB RAM and 16GB storage. On the first boot the free RAM was 2GB and you get about 11GB space for apps. Apps can be installed on external storage and OTG is also supported.

Honor 6 runs Android KitKat 4.4.2 out of the box with Emotion UI 2.3. The interfaced is very fluid and quite attractive.

Performance
This handset (Model H60—L04) is using 1.7GHz HiSilicon Kirin 920 Octa Core chipset big.LITTLE architecture [4 x A7 1.3GHz plus 4 x A15 1.7GHz) coupled with Mali T624 GPU. CPU-Z app was showing 1.3GHz whereas the Antutu benchmark showed 1.7GHz frequency. Performance is lag free, benchmark scores are quite impressive, however at high usage the handset heats up (temperature well below 50 degrees).

Benchmark scores

Gaming
I tried looking for MC5 (Modern Combat 5) but could not find it when I searched for it on Google Play, probably the game is not compatible with the hardware. I could install Asphalt 8 and Real Racing 3 and both of these games played very well without any issues. I played Asphalt in high visual quality mode.

Entertainment
The hardware seems powerful but it failed to play 4K videos. I tried playing 4K video using MX player. It failed in H/W mode and did show up in S/W mode but with a lot of lags / slow motion. Full HD videos played without any issues.

Camera
There is 13MP rear AF camera with dual LED flash and 5MP on the front. Rear camera can record full HD videos at 30fps and you can shoot HDR videos in 720p resolution. The auto focus is pretty fast. Camera supports smart mode, watermark, filters, HDR, beauty shot and more.

The still camera and video quality is above average but not the best. Check the sample images and videos at the end of this review.

Others
This handset supports 4G, 3G, 2G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. I got the GPS lock within 5 seconds. No issues with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I am using the Airtel network in Mumbai and as of now they are not proving 4G services in Mumbai. I did get a message for the first time that 4G is not available; it then switched to 3G (H+).

Sound is loud and clear it is using DTS sound technology. If you place the handset on a flat surface it will block the speaker vent and in turn the sound. In call sound is very good and clear.

Handset does heats up with heavy usage, I was outdoor shooting sample images and videos, when I finished with the shoot, the max temp was around 49 degrees.

There is IR blaster but there are no pre-installed apps on the phone for that.

Battery
There is built in battery of 3000 mAh capacity. Here are the test results.

You can expect continuous battery backup of about 4 to 6 hours. It will easily give over a day with moderate usage. There are different power saving modes that will help get more juice on a single charge. Ultra Power saving mode is also available that will use minimal colors and a simple interface – this is a very good option when the battery is very low and you don’t have any other options to charge the handset.

Verdict
It is a good handset for under Rs. 20,000 with 4G enabled. It is using a different octa core processor and some apps may not be compatible. Performance is very good, no lags but handset heats up.

Camera quality could have been better. Now the Huawei Honor 6 does not really compete with the Killer OnePlus one model – OPO gives better camera output as compared with Honor 6 and most importantly OPO can play 4K and shoot 4K videos which Honor 6 unfortunately can’t.

Honor 6 does compete with the other Octa Core processor and does have an advantage with it comes to 4G and 3GB RAM.

Huawei Honor 6 is available for Rs. 19,999.

Huawei Honor 6 Image Gallery

Front camera sample

Huawei Honor 6 video review

1080p video sample shot using this handset

720p video sample shot in HDR video mode