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Huawei Honor 6 Quick Review

Released in the Philippines just last month, the Huawei Honor 6 is probably one of the most affordable mid-range smartphone in the market but with impressive configuration.

With a price tag of only Php13,990, this full HD smartphone comes with an octa-core Kirin 920 chip, 3GB of RAM and LTE-capability.

As reference, you can read about our Huawei Ascend Mate 7 here as there are a number of similarities in terms of features, UI and performance.

The Honor 6 sports a glass on glass body, much like the ones we saw with the Xperia Z3 and the iPhone 4S. In fact, the shape and contours of the Honor 6 closely resembles that of the iPhone 4S, along with the silver trimmings around the sides.

The phone feels good on the hands; at 5.0 inches, it’s just the right size for single-handed operation. It has a solid design, slightly hefty feel to it and a bit slippery on the hands due to the glossy finish and mainly glass construction.

The power button and volume rocker is found on the right side, while the 3.5mm audio port, noise-canceling mic and IR blaster are found at the top. The speaker mic is found at the bottom end along with the micro-USB port. The micro-SIM card and the microSD card slots are both found in a flap compartment on the right side as well.

The front panel is fully covered in solid glass with an IPS LCD panel with the front facing camera, speakers and sensors at the top corner. There’s an spacious empty space at the bottom where capacitive buttons are normally placed but there is none in favor of the virtual buttons of Android Kitkat.

The display panel has a full HD 1080 resolution giving it a pixel density of 441ppi. The screen is bright and crisp, colors are balanced with high contrast. The Emotion UI 2.5 looked very simple and clean. There is no app drawer so all of the apps and widgets are spread across multiple home screens or organized into folders.

The widgets and icons have a clean flat design with rounded corners. The UI is very snappy and responsive. Emoion UI comes with several pre-installed custom themes and there’s actually another Home Style (tile based similar to WP8) you can switch to if you want a simple, tile-based interface which makes it much less confusing to older folks, those with disability and the likes.

The 13MP rear camera is by Sony using an IMX214 sensor which is the same one used by the Nexus 6. It’s a pretty good sensor and photos looked sharp and clean.

Here are some of the sample photos we took using the rear camera.

[fancygallery id=”165″ album=”198″]

Performance is very impressive for its category. Considering the Honor 6 uses Huawei’s own Kirin 920 chipset, the processor is a 1.7GHz octa-core with a Mali-T624 graphics paired with a whooping 3GB of RAM. This is perhaps the most affordable smartphone with 3GB of RAM, even beating local brands like the Starmobile Knight X (priced at 16k).

We did a number of the usual benchmark tests and got these pretty impressive scores. The results are actually very close (and sometimes higher) than it’s bigger sibling, the Ascend Mate 7 running a Kirin 925 chip.

BenchmarksHonor 6Ascend Mate 7
Antutu Benchmark42,94643,419
Quadrant Benchmark11,85411,329
NenaMark 259.3 fps60.2 fps
Vellamo1334 (Metal)
1720 (Multicore)
2765 (Chrome)
1,395 (Metal)
2,838 (HTML 5)
PCMark2,891
3DMark13,65314,402

The device only has one SIM card slot although we know that there is a dual-SIM variant with 32GB internal storage. The microSD card beside it adds up to 64GB of storage.

The chip also supports LTE-A or Cat. 6, which can handle up to 300Mbps downlink speed although our local network still does not support it.

We were also surprised that our unit had an IR blaster (we didn’t see it in the initial announcement) which serves as a remote control for TV and other appliances.

As for battery life, the Honor 6 got an impressive 13.5 hours on a single full charge using our standard bench of video playback at 50% brightness and 0% volume. That’s one of the highest we’ve seen recently, even beating the Xperia Z3 with the same 3100mAh battery capacity.

So far, we’re pretty impressed with the Honor 6. Huawei did a good job at the design and specs department then coupled it with a very affordable price that even local flagship phones would find hard to match.

Huawei Honor 6 specs:
5-inch IPS LCD full HD display @ 1920 x 1080 resolution, 441ppi
Corning Gorilla Glass 3
Kirin 920 octa-core processor (4 x ARM Cortex A15 1.7GHz and 4 x A7 1.3GHz cores)
Mali-T624 GPU
3GB RAM
16GB internal storage
up to 64GB via microSD card
HSPA+, LTE Cat. 6 300Mbps
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, dual-Band
13MP rear camera with Sony IMX214 sensor and f/2.0 aperture
Dual-LED flash
5MP front camera
IR Blaster
GPS with aGPS support
Android 4.4.2 KitKat with Emotion UI 2.3
Li-Ion 3100mAh battery
139.8 x 68.8 x 7.5mm
135 grams

What we liked about it:
* Good, solid design design
* Huge RAM capacity
* Great full HD display
* Impressive performance
* LTE Cat 6 connectivity
* IR remote
* Very good camera
* Very long battery life
* Very affordable

What we did not like:
* No NFC
* A bit slippery on the hands

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

22 Responses

  1. Avatar for Murukesan Murukesan says:

    Dear Sir,

    Can you solve above matter of my – Huawaie Honor 6 Model – H60-L04 Today morning on wards above this problem coming.Mobile re start then one mint screen stand the dead behavior after screen black color come.Kindly can I solve this matter.Model – H60-L04
    Kernel Verson – android@localhost#1
    CPU – Hisilicon Kirin 920
    Ram – 3.0GB
    Phone Storage – 3.0GB
    16.00GB
    Resolution – 720 X 1280
    Android Verson – 4.4.2

    Thanks & Regards,
    Murukesan

  2. Avatar for Cazer Cazer says:

    SA sm southmall meron

  3. Avatar for luloy luloy says:

    wala na ata sa lazada e , sa sm north kaya meron?

  4. Avatar for Gab Gab says:

    @Wawa It seems na magkakaron ng maraming variants and Asus Zenfone 2. The one priced at $199 will basically have the same specs with the current zenfone 5 (based on the leaked specs sheet), naupgrade lang yung os and lumiit yung bezels so nothing special there imo. The one with the 4gb ram will be priced at $400+ I think. So if I’m gonna choose I’d rather go with the honor 6 ^_^ looks great and the specs are awesome for that price range.

  5. Avatar for Wawa Wawa says:

    Asus Zenfone 2 is far much better than this phone. Anyway, Zenfone 2 is not yet available until march. By the time Zenfone 2 comes out, it will crushed all midrange phone.

  6. Avatar for Rockafella Rockafella says:

    This baby right here is sexy as phuck!

  7. Avatar for nitsnits nitsnits says:

    THE PHOTOS LOOK IMPRESSIVE! THE DETAILS WERE VERY CRISP, VISIBLE AND SMOOTH. AT FIRST GLANCE, YOU WOULD THOUGHT THAT IT WAS SHOT BY A DSLR!

  8. Avatar for Gian Bancod Gian Bancod says:

    Hello sir Abe! Did you already tried speedtest of it’s Cat-6 LTE? :)

  9. Avatar for Mark Mark says:

    Bakit ang price sa megamall 14999 saan may 13999

  10. Avatar for Felipe Felipe says:

    Naka-order na ako sa Lazada,
    Cash on delivery

    waiting na lang

  11. Avatar for ed ed says:

    saan po ito available maliban sa lazada? at how much po?

  12. Avatar for Andre Andre says:

    Are you sure it’s glass? I’ve seen pics of the Honor 6 with badly scratched back panels. I think it’s plastic, not glass. This ain’t an iPhone 4

    • Avatar for Abe Olandres Abe Olandres says:

      We’re still on the fence with that. Feels like non-tempered glass or faux-glass plastic. Other sites describe it as glass as well (PC Advisor UK, Android Central, CNet). Yes, it’s scratchable.

  13. Avatar for Miko Miko says:

    the thickness is actually 7.5 mm not 6.5 lol.

  14. Avatar for NotASheep NotASheep says:

    So where ya get it? is it available now?

  15. Avatar for Milhouse Milhouse says:

    Impressive. Taob Xiaomi Mi4

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