BackReview: Honor 6x offers tough competition to Xiaomi Redmi Note 4
Honor 6x is another big screen smartphone in the budget segment that ticks most boxes
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Camera has been the highlight in many Huawei smartphones recently. Some of the features such as the dual camera setup is now available in their budget smartphones like the Honor 6x. Priced at Rs12,999 (3GB+32GB) and Rs15,999 (4GB+64GB), the Honor 6x is available only on Amazon.in after prior registration.
Design: Well-built and handy
Huawei has used the same metallic back and glass front design seen in a number of its rivals. The presence of metal adds to its build quality and good looks. The phone also doesn’t feel heavy or ungainly in the hand. It weighs just 162g and is nicely curved around the edges which makes it look slimmer than the 8.2mm profile. The grip quality over the phone is not very good, though. It feels a bit slippery due to the curved edges.
The circular shaped fingerprint sensor compliments the dual camera design on the back. Not only it looks good, but impresses with its accuracy too. The camera module does feel a bit protruded.
Display: Handles colours well
The 5.5-inch display has a screen resolution of 1,920x1,080p, which is what most of the popular phones at this price point are offering nowadays. It’s a good looking display and can handle colours in photos, movies and games very well. Text in web pages, ebooks and app icons look crisp.
User can also personalise the display as they choose by changing colour temperature in the display settings. This allows one to switch between warm and cool colour tints.
Another handy feature is the Eye Comfort mode which can reduce stress on eyes by switching on the blue light filter. The display mode allows user to adjust the size of user interface. This doesn’t affect the resolution but only increases or decreases the size of app icons, text and images in one go.
Software: Feature packed and colourful interface
The Honor 6x runs Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) with the latest Emotion UI 4.0 over it. This is a heavily customised UI with well spaced apps icons, and some beautiful looking themes and wallpapers. What makes it better than plain Android is that users get plenty to play with. Compared to other custom UIs it looks a lot more polished and smooth.
The universal search bar is one of the cool features which makes it easier for users to find an app, contact, photo on phone’s storage by swiping down on homescreen.
The phone’s secondary interface shows the apps in big tiles like layout. It looks a lot like the Windows Phone interface minus the live tile feature.
Performance: Cool customer
The smartphone runs on Huawei’s proprietary Hi Silicon Kirin 655 octa-core processor. Paired with 4GB RAM, this little known processor was able to handle most tasks without any signs of sluggishness or heating up. The overall browsing through apps was swift and quite responsive even when we had 8 to 10 apps running in the back.
The phone provides 64GB of internal storage which is impressive. In case this doesn’t suffice, you can always add a microSD card of up to 256GB.
The Honor 6x has a 3,430mAh battery which was able to last a whole day on a single charge, which is quite adequate for a modest user.
Camera: Plenty to offer
The 12-megapixel camera can deliver good-looking shots in well-lit conditions. Colours look accurate and the amount of detailing in daytime shots is impressive. Low-light photography is not one of its strong points and suffers from the usual foibles of a budget smartphone camera.
The 2-megapixel camera placed next to the 12-megapixel camera comes in to action when you want to highlight depth of field in an image. It works by reducing focus on any object and enhancing focus on another. One can do it manually in the camera roll and then save the picture. It works best with objects within a range of 2 metres, though. The phone offers plenty of cool camera modes and live filters too.
Verdict
Honor 6x is a solid addition to the budget Android smartphone segment and scores highly in terms of looks, display, performance and software front. The only reason to go for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (Rs 12,999 onwards) over the 6x is the bigger battery and superior (Qualcomm Snapdragon 625) processor. You can also consider the Moto G4 Plus (Rs12,499 onwards) if you are not into custom UIs because plain Android interfaces have their useability advantages.
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