In an event in New Delhi, Huawei’s new sub-brand Honor made its presence felt with the launch of its two new phones, Honor 6 Plus and Honor 4X. The Honor 6 Plus, Huawei’s flagship smartphone under the new brand, is its first high-priced product. A few days earlier we reviewed the Honor 4X, and now we have had a chance for a hands-on with Honor 6 Plus as well. Here is what we drew out of the smartphone’s experience.
The Honor 6 Plus sports a unibody glass-back body finish with a metal frame. The smartphone is sturdy and tough with a well-flushed bezel. Not to miss, the company claims to have done a bullet test on the Honor 6 Plus and it purportedly survived it. (Now you know how to keep your heart safe from all the bullets!) Moving on, the phone feels good to hold and touch, but it’s a tad bit inconvenient to use with one hand, owing to the large build factor. The smartphone is 7.5mm thick and weighs 165g.
.jpg)
The Honor 6 Plus flaunts a 5.5-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. The front panel sports an earpiece, an 8MP front camera and a notification LED on the top, while the bottom of the panel sports no buttons whatsoever, the menu and setting buttons are given within the user interface.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
On the right edge, the Honor 6 Plus, sports a volume rocker, a power button, and two trays for SIM cards. At the bottom edge sits a USB charging port and a microphone, while the top edge of the smartphone features an audio jack, an IR sensor and a secondary microphone. The IR sensor bestows the smartphone with the functions of a remote, which can control a television, air conditioner or a set-top box via infrared.
.jpg)
At the back panel, the Honor 6 Plus features a dual, parallel 8MP camera with an LED flash placed right beside it. A speaker grille is also featured along the left edge of the back panel.
Though the front and back panel look quite chic because of the glass finish, there is a tiny slip up. Owing to the glossiness, both the front and back panel tend to attract quite a bit of fingerprints and smudges. However, regardless of being a smudge magnet, on the ergonomics front, the Honor 6 Plus scores quite decently.
Under the hood, the Honor 6 Plus is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 925 chipset, which comprises of an octa-core (quad-core Cortex-A15 and quad-core Cortex-A7) processor and 3GB of RAM. It embraces an internal storage of 32GB, which is expandable up to 128GB using a microSD card. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual band, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot, 4G, a micro USB 2.0, Bluetooth v4.0 and GPS. The Honor 6 Plus is fuelled with a non-removable Li-Po 3,600 mAh battery, which easily lasts for more than 24 hours. However, the battery’s runtime will completely depend on the kind of usage on the smartphone.
The Honor 6 Plus runs on Android KitKat 4.4.4 operating system, which is layered with Honor’s customised user interface, the Emotion UI 3.0. The smartphone’s UI, however, resembles a lot to Xiaomi’s MIUI, seen on their Mi handsets and tablets. The 6 Plus’ UI is smooth and fluid, and the transitions are effortless as well. Altogether, the Honor 6 Plus offers a decent performance.
The display of the smartphone has a great viewing angle, and the display’s legibility in bright sunlight is pretty good too — clear enough to read even in bright sunlight.
As mentioned earlier, the Honor 6 Plus sports a single speaker grille at the back panel. Though the speaker is petite, the audio quality is loud and clear. However, the speaker being placed at the back, you have to ensure to keep the phone face-down when listening to an audio or even otherwise, because when resting on its back, the audio tends to get muffled. Unfortunately, the smartphone does not come along with a pair of earphones, forcing you to invest a little extra on a compatible headset.
Moving further to the camera, which is the main USP of the smartphone, the Honor 6 Plus sports three 8MP cameras — two on the rear and one in the front. The company claims the dual, parallel 8MP cameras to offer an SLR-like picture quality. We therefore decided to play around a bit with the smartphone’s camera, and the results were quite impressive. The pictures taken by the Honor 6 Plus are vibrant and crisp, however, when zoomed-in the pictures lack adequate sharpness.
The 8MP front camera also yields high quality pictures, and the camera is ideal for selfies and video callings. The camera also has a smile detection feature.
Below are a few shots taken from the rear camera. You can click to view/download the images and view them at full resolution in order to judge the performance of the camera.
Wrapping up the review, our experience with the smartphone was quite decent. The Honor 6 Plus is a good-looking smartphone with two of its features being the highlight — the powerful dual, parallel camera and the long battery life. Since, a good camera and a decent battery life is what people usually demand of a smartphone, the Honor 6 Plus would definitely make a good buy. Although priced handsomely at Rs 26,499, a tad bit higher than what its contemporaries are tagged at, the smartphone’s asking price seems justified considering the powerful camera.
