Last Saturday, Honor launched the most high-end affordable smartphone – Honor 6 – in Malaysia with a RM999 price tag. This price has been making a lot of noise, obviously people are quite excited about this Honor 6.
How good is Honor 6? Could it beat other affordable smartphones that cost below RM 1,000, and be comparable to high-end flagship smartphones? Have a read of our review below to find out more about it.
Simple unboxing
The Honor box remains a light blue color, exuding a refreshing and youthful feeling.
In the box, you’ll find the USB cable and 2.0A charger. Although there are no earphones provided for Honor 6, there are screen protectors for the front and rear.
Honor 6 features a 5-inch 1080p JDI In-Cell display. The screen-to-body ratio achieves 75.7% and the screen bezel is slim with the very fine 2.86mm. The dimension of the phone itself is 139.6mm x 69.7mm x 7.5mm and its weight is about 130g. It is well designed to be compact, and at the same time easy for one hand handling. The front-facing screen is covered by 3rd Generation Corning Gorrilla glass and even coated in an anti-fingerprint film. Feels good to the touch.
The rear cover of Honor 6 is claimed to be made of 6 composite technologies and has a peacock-inspired pattern. When there is shine on the rear cover, the peacock pattern becomes more obvious and vibrant, creating 3D line glares and diamond blinks. Perhaps this is not a very awesome or great design, but it is unique and stylish in its own way, in every tiny aspect of this design.
However, the composite material of the rear cover is not that durable and tough as originally thought, so as a recommendation, please ensure its protection with the free screen protector.
On the upper side of the front facing screen, there is an earpiece, light sensor and a 5MP front-facing camera. They are placed at the same level in one line, and seems balanced. There is also an LED indicator that notifies the user in when there is an incoming notifications.
For the lower side, there are no any physical or capacitive buttons. The navigation buttons will be on screen as the one featured in the stock Android. The corners of the phone are well rounded, feel good for the hands-on, no hard edges or discomfort feeling.
There is one 13MP primary camera with dual tone LED flash on the rear, located at the top left of the phone.
For the bottom side, the speaker is located at the left also. It is designed to be on-plane with the rear cover without visible gap. There should be no dust issue around the speaker but the sound turns low whenever the phone is placed on a flat surface.
There is a 3.5mm standard earphone jack at top of the body, and also the noise reduction microphone and an Infrared (IR) blaster. Anyway, this IR blaster is only supported by 90% among Malaysian electronics, and yet Honor is temporarily closing the IR remote remote control feature. Until it is well developed, the IR remote control feature will be back in the next upgrade pack.
MicroUSB and microphone are located at the bottom. The MicroUSB supports the OTG feature.
The body has a very fine thickness at just 7.5mm. The Honor 6 middle frame is designed to be C-shaped, covering around the body on the left side, top side and right side, except the bottom side. The volume buttons and power buttons are located at the right side of the phone.
Anyway, the Honor 6 middle frame is not made of metal but is a metallic painted plastic material. The SIM card and MicroSD card slots are designed to be in the same opening of the frame.
One thing to point out is that the Honor 6 for Malaysia will be the single SIM, not the Dual SIM version as seen in China. The single SIM Honor 6 for Malaysia is able to support Cat6 4G LTE.
Under close observation, you will find out that the buttons are crafted in slant-line patterns, which create a contrast of touch with the middle frame and even upgrade the tactile impression.
In terms of design, Honor 6 is well crafted. Every detail is thought out and finely managed. With the compact size, the lightweight and the high screen-body ratio, Honor 6 is perfectly designed for one-hand handling. Anyway, the design seems to be following a similar concept from other manufacturer, w that people which may lead people to mistake it for an iPhone. If the middle frame is replaced with metal or another premium material, the design could be improved to a better level.
2. Display
Honor 6 features the Japanese company, JDI’s 5-inch 1080p In-Cell display with the high pixel density 445ppi. With this display, the Honor 6 gives a good and outstanding visual by its good color saturation. Overall, the display performs well in standard.
Here’s the display comparison between 3 smartphones : Honor 6, Lenovo S850, and lastly HTC Butterfly 2.
Butterfly 2 on the left; Honor 6 on the right.
Butterfly 2 has no issue with viewing angles but Honor 6 does experience color shifting at a critical viewing angle.
To conclude the display review, Honor 6 performs quite good and satisfactorily in both color reproduction and viewing angle. But there is a drawback as mentioned earlier, the Honor 6 screen will become paler at a critical viewing angle. When it comes to being compared with high-end flagship smartphones, theHonor 6 display is not outstanding at all but for smartphones below RM 1000, Honor 6 could be one of the best.
3. Camera performance
Honor 6 primary camera is the 13MP Sony’s 4th Generation BSI CMOS sensor with the large aperture F2.0 and also the 5P lens element. For the image processing, the Honor 6 has included its exclusive IMAGESmart 2.0 to enhance the camera performance, for better photo quality and even low light snapshot. More, the dual tone LED flash gives a very warm and natural lighting to increase the visibility of the image.
Honor 6 camera is well equipped with features. The Honor 6 Camera App has a lot of modes : Smart mode, Beauty Mode, Watermark Camera, Filters, Panorama, Audio control and recording, Best Photo Mode, HDR Mode and All-Focus Mode. The Touch to Capture and Mute camera can also be set in the setting menu.
 |
| This is the result of using the Dual tone flash. The color temperature of the photo is quite good and natural, even in the dim light environment. |
 |
| Honor 6 handles well in anti-glare. (Check out the light bulbs) |
 |
| The color reproduction for Green is well produced. |
Perhaps you can taste and smell how delicious the chicken thigh is. Haha.
The Smart Mode makes for a more visible and brighter Night shot, but the noise are scattered around the photo.
In Auto Mode, the night view looks cleaner with less noise. The noise control is well done.
Anyhow, the Auto Mode makes the night view shot a little reddish in color. I believe the white balance calculation is not that accurate.
In day light, Honor 6 performs well. The detail and photo quality are not bad at all.
The All-Focus Mode is quite interesting to use. First, select the All-Focus mode. Then, focus on the object and snap. Lastly, you may touch anywhere to refocus.
As shown above, the cake is tapped to be focused, then the cake will instantly become very clear. But then the background becomes blurred! How interesting it is.
Honor 6 also supports double-click the volume down key to call out Camera App while the screen is off, allowing you to capture a photo almost instantly in 1.5 seconds.
Honor 6 equipped with a 5MP front-facing camera with 88° ultra-wide-angle and also features the Beautify with 10 Levels. Our model is satisfied with the selfie by Honor 6 too.
For the camera review, we could say that Honor 6 is not only featuring top-quality camera hardware, the optimization for the camera is well done too. Overall, the camera of Honor 6 performs quite well. For white balance calculation and low light shots, however, we are looking forward for more improvement. Hopefully Honor can improve and enhance the camera through the firmware update. For the front-facing camera, whether the Beautify Mode is supposed to blur the face or miscalculate face focus, we are not sure. Perhaps the blurring effect makes you prettier. Haha.
4. Hardware performance
Honor 6 features Huawei’s exclusive HiSilicon Kirin 920 Octa-Core processors with the 28nm big.LITTLE architecture. There are four high-performance Cortex-A15 cores paired with four power-efficient Cortex-A7 cores. The Honor 6 supports the HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing) which allows the 4+4 core processors to run at the same time. So we can say the Kirin 920 is a true Octa-core processor.
The Honor 6 also features the Mali T628 MP4 graphic processing unit. Other than itsstrong graphic performance, it also overcomes and optimizes the basic compatibility of the games.
The Honor 6 is the world first LTE Cat6 Octa-core smartphone. The download speed could be up to 300Mbps. While at the same time, the built-in professional audio processors Tensilica HIFI3 is also featured in Honor 6 to enhance the Audio quality.
The Honor 6 has 3GB ram and 16GB internal storage, expandable with MicroSD. Even though the Honor 6 has been set as the mid-high-end smartphone, the specification is quite powerful. From here we can see how sincere Honor is to make this Honor 6.
On the mainstream AnTuTu benchmark, the Honor 6 could score about 40k, in which as good as the flagship high-end smartphone nowadays.
While on the other benchmark, Honor 6 also achieves a quite good score.
After 1 week using the Honor 6, there is no longer a compatibility issue with the Kirin 920 at all. In addition, either in performance and power consumption, the HiSilicon Kirin processors do improve a lot. For the heat control, the Honor 6 remains at 40°C below, the highest temperature is up to 45°C in common use. Well done. Other than that, while playing a few heavy games, there is no lag or spike issue on the Honor 6. With the 3GB RAM, Honor 6 could basically perform multiple tasks without any issue. However, there is one thing reflecting a little flaw on the Honor 6, which is the Gallery App which seems very slow to launch. I doubt if it is the software issue.
5. System Application
Honor runs on Android 4.4.2 with its exclusive Emotion UI 2.3. It is colorful and refreshing and suits the youth market it is targeting.
On the Emotion UI 2.3, the Magazine Lockscreen will always change whenever you light up the screen. It seems special. Other that that, swiping up on the lockscreen will prompt the shortcut, similar to the one in iOS.
On Emotion UI 2.3, the main interface has no application drawer. The default theme is used in flat fillet icon!
Honor 6’s available RAM and its multitasking panel.
The Suspend button is one of the feature of Honor 6, which allows to prompt out the virtual buttons and shortcut for better one-hand operation.
However, Emotion UI 2.3’s flat design is not complete because some applications still retain the materialized design.
For the settings interface, there are many setting awaiting for the user to explore and experience!
In short, compared to other manufacturers’ UI, the Emotion UI 2.3 is a little shabby and does not feature any special or exclusive features, resulting in the whole operation being relatively simple. In addition, the lack of unity on the icon design makes the Emotion UI incomplete. So, let’s look forward for the better one in the upcoming Emotion UI 3.0 upgrade on this Honor 6!
6. Battery life
Honor 6 comes with a 3100 mA large battery and features Power-saving mode and Background app manager.
Next will be the battery review on 5-hour usage on the Honor 6. Let’s see how good the Honor 6 performs in its battery life.
1. Playing video locally (1 Hour)：11%
2. Youtube streaming (30 Min)： 6%
3. FB browsing with WiFi (30 Min)： 6%
4. FB browsing with Mobile Data (30 Min)： 9%
5. Phone call and camera (30 Min)： 7%
6. Playing music (30 Min)： 3%
7. Playing game (30 Min)： 11%
8. Web browsing with WiFi (1 Hour)： 14%
The total power consumption is 67%. Battery level remaining is 33%.
Honor 6 has an exclusive power saving feature: Screen Saving that is believed to lower down the graphic quality to enhance the battery life, control the temperature, and also improve the system smoothness. To test how good the Screen Saving helps in enhancing the battery life, the 5-hour battery life test was conducted again. As a result, the total power consumption is 60% and the battery level remaining is 40%. As a comparison with the 1080p graphic normal (default) mode, the Screen Saving is done better in saving more power, about 7% of the battery.
To conclude the battery life review, the Honor 6 does perform well. During the 5-hour test, the phone remains within 40°C. This is good enough to proof that the Kirin 920 performs outstandingly in its power management. For the normal users with moderate usage, the Honor 6 is believed that it could do only 1 charge per day. For the heavy user, perhaps you need the powerbank as your backup.
Conclusion
Honor 6 is currently the smartphone with the best price/performance ratio due to its high-end performance with the affordable price of only RM 999 in Malaysia. The overall performance in every aspect is well balanced. In the price range below RM 1000, currently there is no such power smartphone comparable to this Honor 6 although when it comes to mainstream flagships, the camera, display and processors are still not as good.
Anyway, it costs only RM 999. Apa lagi mau? (What could you expect from the RM 999 smartphone?)
One more thing, Honor 6 hits the market in the correct moment where in the year end, there is no such affordable smartphone in Malaysia market yet. (Especially the Xiaomi Mi4). I believe that the Honor 6 with such good performance at a very affordable price will be the craze among buyers.
Other than that, if the design language of Honor and accessories could get away from the design influence of Apple and be brave enough to forge its own way, we believe that this could help Honor make a better reputation and impression for itself in its own branding development.
Lastly, if you are now looking for a good smartphone within the RM 1000 price range, this is it. The Honor 6 should obviously be your first choice here.
SOURCE: MDROID.MY