Chinese smartphone maker Huawei is launching its smartphones one after another as if there was no tomorrow. In a market where price is considered the key selling factor, the Honor brand is responding quite well.
The Honor 6 Plus, a semi-affordable smartphone that offers dual rear camera and a marathon battery life, all for ₹26,499, is quite a deal breaker. To know why, continue reading this story.
Design and Build
Visually, the Honor 6 plus sports an impressive design. The phone features a curved-edge aluminium frame and flat glass finished fibre back, with a gorilla glass coated front giving the device a blended look of iPhone 5S and Xperia Z3.
The device looks really impressive, rugged yet ergonomic. The Honor 6 Plus literally feels great in hand and the luxurious look is icing on the cake.
Measuring 150.5x75.7x7.5mm, the Honor 6 Plus weighs justs 165g and yet feels reasonably tough.
The volume rocker and power key have been elegantly etched on the top of the right side, while the 2 SIM card slots have been housed below it.
Huawei has played an interesting trick here. If you're unwilling to use two numbers together, you can use one slot for expanding the device memory up to 128GB. Unfortunately, the dual SIM thing didn't function in our test, but the micro SD support worked perfectly.
Display
Screen specification is an increasingly competitive aspect when it comes to smartphones, with every manufacturer installing super sharp displays in their respective handsets.
Huawei features a 5.5-inch IPS LCD display with a 73.2% screen-to-body ratio. The display has been able to prompt 1080x1920 pixels resolution at 401PPI pixel density.
The display specification is similar to ASUS's latest ZenFone 2 and slightly (2 pixels) higher than the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and OnePlus One.
In real world use, the display offered pretty good viewing angles with impressive brightness level. Texts and icons were reasonably sharp and colours rich and vibrant.
Operating system and Software
The Honor 6 Plus is powered by a customised edition of Android KitKat 4.4.4. Overlaid with the homemade UI of Huawei EMUI 3.0, the interface sacrifices the app drawer menu and looks quite similar to iOS 8 interface in use.
The interface features all the necessary utilities pre-installed on the phone. The latest interface has been immensely improvised compared to its earlier edition and feels smooth and intuitive to use.
Performance
The Huawei Honor 6 Plus is powered by Huawei's own Octa-Core HiSillicon Kirin 925 chipset and backed with 3GB worth RAM memory.
The Eight core processor has been made by mingling a Quad-Core 1.8GHz Cortex A15 processor and a Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1.3GHz. For meeting the graphic processing requirement, the processors have been implemented with a Mail-T628 MP4 GPU chip.
Benchmarking the Honor 6 Plus, we found the smartphone quite impressive. Tested on AnTuTu, it got a score of 43,544 while with GeekBench 3, the device managed to achieve 864 and 3038 in Single-core and Multi-core respectively.
In real world performance, the device stood by its benchmarking scores, and the Honor 6 Plus opened apps and web pages in a flip and ran all our graphic heavy 3D games without any stuttering experience.
Camera
Coming to the best part of the phone, the Honor 6 Plus packs three cameras instead of the regular two on smartphones. On the rear, the device packs two 8MP cameras for creating a bionic view of the subject for achieving impressive low-light images.
In real life test, the combination worked brilliantly and managed to snap some really cool images. We also noticed the rear camera combination focused quickly and accurately on subjects. We were able to focus from the closest possible range for clicking macro images.
Images taken in regular light generally came crisp and featured great contrast levels. The shutter speed was fairly fast and we didn't notice any shutter lag while saving the images.
For meeting the selfie needs, the Honor 6 Plus packs another 8MP camera for the front. The camera has been able to click decent images, irrespective of the lighting environment. We are also fairly impressed by the filters featured on the camera app.
Unfortunately, the Honor 6 Plus doesn't offer 4K video recording and sticks to 1080p video shooting at a frame rate count of 30fps.
Battery and Storage
The Honor 6 Plus is powered by a monstrous 3,600 mAh battery. The non-removable battery lasted more than seven hours in our video loop test, while most of the current devices last six or six-and-half hours on an average. In real world use, the Honor 6 Plus survived more than one and a half day in stress use.
In internal storage, the Honor 6 Plus comes with 32GB of flash memory, which can be expanded up to 128GB using micro SD card.
Conclusion
The Huawei Honor 6 Plus is available in India exclusively through Flipkart for ₹ 26,499. For its price, the Honor 6 Plus is a good value-for-money smartphone compared to other phablets in its price range. Featuring an elegant design, a powerful octa-core processor, above average battery life and the combination of cameras, the Honor 6 Plus is a great device.
We wish Huawei will consider to upgrade the OS to Android 5.0.2 Lollipop soon, which will then make the Honor 6 Plus a must-buy.
