Dubai: Huawei’s sub-brand Honor’s mid-range device — 6X — is a much-improved device compared to last year’s 5X.
The 6X packs a premium aluminium unibody design with colour-matched plastic caps for phone’s antennas.
The 5.5-inch Full HD device is powered by octa-core 2.1GHz HiSilicon Kirin 655 chip coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage capacity. It has a hybrid SIM tray where either a nano-SIM card and a microSD card or two nano SIM cards can be accommodated. The microSD card supports up to 128GB.
You never feel as if you’re reaching wildly across the screen when you use it one-handed. It’s quite slim and light at 8.2mm and 162 grams.
The display is bright by offering natural looking colours and good viewing angles and it has got the ability to tweak display’s colour temperatures as well as its blue-light filter for evening or lowlight environments.
Honor still opted for microUSB connection instead of Type-C USB port is a disadvantage.
There are a single-piece volume rocker and power button on the right edge that gives a decent click when pressed, and there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack and noise-cancelling microphone on the top edge.
The fingerprint sensor, just below the camera, is really fast and it can be used to take a photo, answer a call, stop an alarm, show your notification panel, or browse through photos.
The single downward-facing speaker on the left side produces better sound than you’d expect for a phone at this price point. On the downward side of the right is the microphone.
The OS and user interface are still old out of the box and not with Android 7.0 (Nougat) version and EMUI 5.
The user interface has improved and now with a highly customisable interface that’s still laden with themes, options for different home screen transitions and unique widgets.
Where it does shine is with regards to shortcuts and usability tweaks — fingerprint gestures for accessing notifications or swiping through photos, along with split-screen multitasking, even if it only works with a handful of the company’s own applications.
Huawei’s Health app for step counting, basic fitness and exercises are worth it.
The Honor 6X comes with a couple of dozen pre-installed apps, but some of them can be uninstaller.
The device sports a Mali-T830MP2 graphics chip, and with certain rich 3D games, it struggles a bit on account of the 1080p resolution.
The interesting part is the dual cameras on the rear, which brings the premium imaging capabilities of the Huawei P9 and Mate 9.
The rear houses 12MP (colour) and 2MP (monochrome) rear cameras with a 1.25μm pixel size, built-in noise reduction algorithms and the camera can refocus (within an aperture value of f/.95 to f/16) on subjects in the foreground after the picture has been taken, and automatically convert pictures to monochrome.
The Honor 6X’s camera uses Phase Detection Auto Focus technology, which allows for an ultra-fast camera focus speed of 0.3 seconds.
It is a solid camera for the budget phone and does well even in low light and at night, though it does tend to blur if you move too much, because the shutter speed slows down.
Pictures are clear and detailed in better light conditions, and autofocus locks on quickly. Shots become grainy in dimmer light, but enabling HDR or Night mode does help reduce some of the muddiness.
The purpose of the secondary sensor is to allow for bokeh in wide aperture mode. The wide aperture shots worked well in indoors and outside, focusing on the objects in the foreground and attractively blurring out the area behind it.
Although the Honor 6X won’t challenge the iPhone, Galaxy, or Pixel for best smartphone camera, it’s still impressive given the price point.
Huawei’s popular camera modes such as wide aperture mode, professional mode, food mode, perfect selfie, beauty mode, panorama, and HDR. Other more offbeat features include the option to add a watermark, make an audio note, or capture a document, are a swipe away.
It also records 1080p videos at 30 frames per second.
The 8MP front camera features a 77-degree lens for wide-angle selfies and a built-in “Beauty” mode that recognises and fixes blemishes. It also takes decent snaps.
Regarding connectivity, it has 4G, NFC, Bluetooth 4.1, WiFi, WiFi+, GPS and Link+.
The 3,340mAh non-removable battery is decent enough to last for two full days for moderate users and one full day for heavy users. The advantage is that the fast-charging technology will help the battery to charge from zero to full in around two hours. During my testing, it lasted for around 8 hours of video play back.
The built-in Battery Manager lets you reduce power drain by controlling which apps run in the background. There also two different power saving modes.
The Honor 6X is available in gold, grey, and silver. It is priced at Dh919.
Good
• Value for money
• Excellent battery
• Rich camera features
• Fast fingerprint sensor
• Sleek metal unibody build
Cons
• Not latest OS out of box
• No 5 GHz WiFi support
• No Type-C USB support
• Heavy UI layer
• Noise-cancelling microphone needs to improve
