Huawei’s sub-brand, Honor, has been pretty good in terms of devices launched in India in the last couple of years. We have reviewed the Honor 5X and 5C which were launched last year. Both the devices had great cameras in their respective price segments. Then came Honor 8 with the dual camera set up, but it was a flagship device for Honor series. Now the company has launched their latest budget offering, the Honor 6X with dual camera.
Honor 6X features a 5.5 inch Full HD display and is powered by Kirin 655 Octa core processor with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM. On the camera front, we have a 12MP + 2MP dual camera set up on the rear camera and an 8MP front camera. So how does the Honor 6X perform in this price segment, let’s find out in this detailed review?
Design and Build:
Honor 6X retains the same metal construction we found on the Honor 5X. It comes with a unibody metal body with plastic parts on top and bottom. The rear panel of the device has a tapered finished with making the device slim at the edges and it is quite a good device in hand.
The build quality of the device is also very good and gives a premium feel. There is a slight projection for the dual camera unit on the rear panel. The fingerprint scanner is placed below the camera unit. The rear camera has LED flash placed adjacent to it. The 3.5mm audio jack is placed on the top panel while the bottom section houses the micro USB charging slot and the speaker unit. The power and volume keys are placed on the right side, while the SIM tray is placed on the left side. The front panel has the 5.5-inch display, on-screen navigational buttons and Honor logo below it.
Display:
The Honor 6X packs a 5.5 inch Full HD 1080p display and it is quite a good display. The sharpness levels are good and so is the overall brightness. In outdoor condition, there is enough brightness on offer, but the issue with the display is that it is not vibrant and colorful like what we have seen on Redmi Note 4 or a Coolpad Cool 1.
The viewing angles are also good and considering the price segment, the Honor 6X has quite a good display. The phone comes with a screen guard pre-installed as the display does not offer any protection.
Software:
Honor 6X runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and on top of that we have the EMUI 4.1. When we reviewed the Honor 5c with EMUI 4.1 we mentioned that the company has done a lot of work in optimizing the heavy UI. The EMUI offers lots of added features and tools. It comes with multiple home screens devoid of an app drawer with custom settings and notification panel. It is definitely one of those UIs which offers lots of customization options.
You also get the simpler home screen and smart assistance feature which brings in features like customizable navigational bar, floating dock, motion control, one-handed UI, voice control, gloves mode and more. There are a plethora of options available in the EMUI. There are also a handful of pre-installed tools from Huawei.
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 6X has fingerprint scanner located on the rear panel and you can configure it from the settings. Other than unlocking the device, the fingerprint scanner also supports some gestures including taking photos and also browsing the gallery.
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. Finally, you can also customize the three on screen buttons by adding a new button or changing the position. Overall, the EMUI is a feature rich UI offering lots of additional options and it feels more refined with 4.1 and Android 6.0.
Performance:
Under the hood, the Honor 6X packs a HiSilicon Kirin 655 Octa core processor which is an in-house chipset and is coupled with either 3GB or 4GB of RAM. The internal storage is either at 32GB or 64GB based on the version. There is also micro SD card expansion slot available. There is a significant improvement in processing abilities when compared to Honor 5X and the overall performance is good. In day to day usage, we hardly noticed any issues and it performed very well. Even when playing high graphic rich games on high settings, the performance was quite good.
It handles almost all tasks with ease and there is adequate memory to handle it.
The call quality of the device is also good, the speaker performance is decent for a mid-range phone. There is dual SIM card support along with SD card hybrid slot. This is probably the first phone from Honor with support for VoLTE out of the box. The fingerprint scanner located on the rear panel is also good and unlocks the device in quick time without any lags. Overall, we don’t have anything to complain about the performance of the device.
Camera:
Dual camera setups are nothing new for Honor, we have seen it in 2-year-old Honor 6 Plus, Honor 8 and also other devices in the Huawei line up. Honor 6X comes with a dual 12 and 2MP with phase detection autofocus, LED flash, 1.25µm pixel size, and a wide aperture range from f/0.95 – f/16 along an 8MP front camera for selfies. If you have previously used an Honor device, you might be already knowing the camera interface of Honor phones and it comes with a plethora of options and modes to play with. If you swipe from the left side, there are plenty of modes including HDR, Pro mode, night more and more. One of the interesting options is the Pro or manual mode in video recording which is impressive.
There is also a depth of field mode (wide aperture) where you can capture images with bokeh effects. There is also a live preview for the depth of field mode which means you know how the actual image will be when you are shooting. There is also an option to edit them later.
Talking about the image quality, the dual camera on the rear produces great images in daylight conditions. The overall experience using the camera is good with fast focusing and processing. The dual rear camera does a good job with good color reproduction. The photos are well detailed, and the camera does a great job with balancing highlights. The close-up images can be shot with wide aperture mode and the processing is again impressive.
Even in low light conditions, the phone does a good job and reduces the noise in the photos. But in extremely low light scenarios you could see some noise, but acceptable for a phone in this segment. The front 8MP camera also does a good job with selfie photos. The phone can also record videos in 1080p, but there is no 4k recording as Kirin 655 does not support it. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.
Battery Life:
The Honor 6X packs a 3340mAh battery which is quite a good capacity for a phone in this segment. The battery performance of the device is also very good and it can easily get you through 1.5 days of battery life. The EMUI is optimized for battery usage and it also offers some options to make the best use of battery life. Huawei’s in-house processor, the Kirin 655 is efficient on battery usage.
Verdict:
Honor 6X has lots of things going its way including a good design, build, customizable software, good camera, and battery life along with performance. There is hardly anything to complain on Honor 6X, but having said that this isn’t the most powerful device for gaming in the segment. Priced at Rs 12,999 for the 3GB RAM and 32GB storage, the Honor 6X is available exclusively on Amazon. If you want a good all-around no-nonsense phone, Honor 6X is definitely a good device to buy.
