The Honor smartphone brand has launched in Europe and we've take a look at the first smartphone to come harbouring the new logo which is made by Huawei. Here's our Honor 6 hands-on review. Also see: Best smartphones 2014 and Best Android phones 2014.
Launched today in Berlin, the Honor 6 will go on sale tomorrow (29 October) at Amazon with a price of £249..
On the design side the device is 7.5 mm and 130 g which nicely thin and light for a 5in phone and not far off the impressive Huawei Ascend P7. Honor says "The dazzling 3D diamond-style texture back cover is inspired by nature. A 6-layer high-complex surface treatment is made with special composite materials."
That may be a bunch of marketing speak, but the Honor 6 does look and feel quite nice. It would feel more expensive than the price tag suggests if it wasn't for the fake metal sides which look like they've been spray painted by hand.
Like its cousin, the Honor 6 uses a 5in IPS LCD display with a Full HD resolution meaning a pixel density of 441ppi – and that's more than fine with us for a mid-range phone. It looks great and has decent brightness which is often the downfall of a cheaper handset.
Under that 'dazzling' exterior is a Kirin920 processor which is an octa-core chip – another surprise for a device with this price tag. It uses four 1.7 GHz A15 cores and four 1.3 GHz A7 processors for a combination of power and efficiency.
The phone also has a Mali-T628 GPU, 3 GB of RAM and a built-in co-processor i3 which can manage external sensors when the phone is in standby mode. Our first impression is that the Honor 6 is nicely smooth and responsive but we'll update this soon after further testing.
Coming back to efficiency, Honortouts a whopping battery life of 2.7 days for the Honor 6 from its 3100 mAh battery. It also has the ultra battery saving mode seen on the P7 which will give 24 hours use from 10 percent charge.
Storage is set at either 16- or 32 GB and there's a microSD card for adding up to 64 GB memory cards.
On the wireless side the big feature here is Cat 6 4G LTE which provides up to 300Mbps (although remember that is just a theoretical speed and you probably won't see any difference to Cat 4 at the moment). The Honor 6 also has dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and NFC.
Despite that affordable price tag, the Honor 6 offers flagship specs in the photography department. At the back is a 13 Mp rear camera which uses a fourth-generation Sony sensor, has a dual-LED flash and supports HDR (high dynamic range).
The firm claims it's the fastest at taking photos at just 0.6 seconds. You can handily take photos without needing to switch the screen on by double tapping the volume down – you just need to be good (or lucky) and framing the picture.
The camera seems pretty decent after a quick go and although the speed shooting doesn't hit 0.6 seconds most of the time, we did get it to manage it once.
Following on from the HTC One M8's lead, the Honor 6 offers a focus mode which lets you select the area of focus in a photo after you've taken it. For selfie fans, there is a 5 Mp camera with a wide angle lens and 1.4um pixel size. Honor touts the camera as the fastest possible snapshot around at 0.6 seconds.
The Honor 6 comes pre-loaded with Android 4.4 KitKat and Huawei's Emotion UI 2.3. The firm has promised periodical software upgrades which will be based on consumer feedback via its website or social media channels. We assume it will get Android 5.0 Lollipop.
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