Along with the release of Honor 5X, Huawei also announced the budget device, the Honor Holly 2 Plus in India. The Honor Holly was first announced in 2014 and was a very good device for the price and now the Honor Holly 2 Plus is announced by the company with upgraded specs. The Honor Holly 2 Plus comes with a 5 inch HD Display (1280 X 720P).
The device is powered by MediaTek MT6735P 64-bit quad-core processor which is clocked at 1.3GHz coupled with a Mali-T720 MP3 GPU and 2GB of RAM. Here is the detailed review of the phone.
Design and Build:
The Honor Holly 2 Plus features a completely different design when compared to the Honor Holly from 2014. This has got a curved rear panel with a textured finishing and cross lines. This actually gives a good grip on the phone. The rear panel has 13MP camera, LED flash and Honor branding. The sides of the device, although made of plastic is given a chrome finishing to give a metallic look. While it delivers to an extent, it does not give a premium feel with the finishing.
At the bottom, you can see speaker grills along with micro USB slot although it comes with only one speaker. The top portion houses the 3.5 mm audio jack while the right side has power and volume keys. The feedback of the keys is good. The front panel has 5 inch HD display, front camera, sensors and the three on-screen buttons. The rear panel is removable and underneath is the 4000mAh non-removable battery, dual SIM card slots, and micro SD expansion slot.
Overall, we would saw the Honor Holly 2 Plus is a fairly good looking phone in this price point although we feel material quality could have been better.
Display:
Honor Holly 2 Plus comes with a 5 inch HD display (1280 X 720P) IPS LCD panel and similar to Honor 5X, there is no protection offered for the display. The colors look decent on the display and so are the viewing angles. The sharpness levels are also fairly decent, but the touch response isn’t very smooth. Similar to Honor 5X, you do feel sticky nature on the display.
While we have seen really good displays at this price point, Honor Holly 2 Plus is just an average performer.
Software:
Honor Holly 2 Plus comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop and a custom UI on top of it. The EMUI is version 3.1 on this device. The EMUI 3.1 looks similar to the one on Honor 5X, but it is a stripped down version with lots of additional features missing. Under the settings, you can see a some good options to customize the device. The phone has a custom notification and quick toggle panel.
The phone comes with themes support and once you have inserted the SIM card in the device you have the option to download themes from the store. You can also customize the themes to create your own theme with ringtones, icons, lock screen etc. The phone also comes with Magazine unlock option which serves a new wallpaper every time you switch on the display.
Honor has also implemented motion control and you can also customize the navigational buttons. The phone also has apps like flashlight, recorder, FM radio and more.
There is also a phone manager app which provides with options like phone accelerator, storage cleaner, call blocked, power saver, traffic manager, do not disturb, app lock and more.
Performance:
The phone is powered by MediaTek MT6735P 64-bit quad-core processor which is clocked at 1.3GHz coupled with a Mali-T720 MP3 GPU and 2GB of RAM. While most of the OEMs use Octa-core chipsets even in the budget segment, Honor decided to go with Quad core.
The performance of the device is pretty decent and should be able to handle most of the day to day activities. But if you push it hard with heavy RAM consuming apps, you feel the lag with EMUI. The gaming performance of the device is again decent and should be able to handle light games and moderately graphic intensive games. The call quality on the phone was quite good, but the speaker performance was just average.
The phone comes with 16GB of internal storage out of which 10.5GB is available to the user in the first boot. You can also increase the storage using the SD card. The multitasking on the phone was also quite decent.
Camera:
The Honor Holly 2 Plus comes with a 13MP rear camera with autofocus, LED flash and a front-facing 5MP camera for selfies. The camera interface looks similar to Honor 5X as both run EMUI 3.1, but the Holly 2 Plus has a stripped down interface with a lot of advanced features missing. While the Honor series is known for the good camera on the phones, the Holly 2 Plus is a shocker in that aspect. The camera performance is pretty poor considering it has a 13MP sensor. The colors look washed out and the sharpness levels are also way too low. Some of the daylight shots have become blurred.
The video recording is also not great with just 720P recording and the company has probably looked to cut down cost by removing 1080p support. The front facing shooter which is a 5MP unit is again an average performer. We feel Honor has simply added a 13MP sensor just for the sake of having it and not worked on post processing. Here are some of the samples taken with the phone.
Battery Life:
One of the specialties of the Honor Holly 2 Plus is the massive 4000mAh battery similar to the Vibe P1m from Lenovo. The phone also comes with reverse charging which means you can use the device as a power bank to charge another phone and this setting can be enabled from the battery option.
Talking about the battery performance, you can easily get 1.5 days of battery life with this device on a moderate usage which includes calls, browsing, social networking, a bit of gaming etc. The phone also comes with multiple profiles to choose in case you want to save battery. If you are looking for great battery life, Holly 2 Plus won’t disappoint you.
Verdict:
Priced at Rs 8499, the Honor Holly 2 Plus competes with Coolpad Note 3, Lenovo Vibe P1m and ASUS Zenfone Max in terms of specs and features. While the Honor Holly 2 Plus is a decent performer, there are a lot of compromises in this device including a poor camera, average build, and display. If you are looking for a decent performer with good battery life and Huawei’s trust as a brand, Honor Holly 2 Plus is a decent buy, else we would suggest Coolpad Note 3 or even the cheaper Lenovo Vibe P1m.
