The Build, Design and Display
Design and The Build Quality
The Huawei Honor 6 is very short in features on front with only a few including ear-piece, a camera and a few sensors on top. There is no Huawei logo or branding on the front. Also the Android navigation keys are skipped in favour of the on-screen software rendered navigation keys.
Leaving the most consumers confused, there is no “Huawei” branding on the front nor on the rear. If you wouldn’t recognize the phone by its design elements, you won’t be able to tell if it’s a Huawei product.
Honor 6 comes without the Gorilla Glass protection but it does have some good anti-fingerprint coating with oleophobic layer to let you wipe off the smudges from the screen . The frame of the device represents as a metal but it’s fully plastic which is not an impressive thing to us whereas the back panel is also made of transparent plastic which looks like a glass too in first impressions. Unlike the front, the fingerprints are easy to stay on the back panel as well as it’s too good to catch scratches – after all it’s a shiny, transparent plastic. With the slippery back, you would really need to take care of the place you are placing it on – it must be an even surface or something that is not slippery too.
A matte plastic would have been much better choice for this phone.
OK, if we have started talking about the rear-panel, lets finish it first.
Controls and Components
“Honor” branding is placed right at the top-middle portion of the device on the back. The 13 megapixels camera is placed on the top-left corner exactly like the iPhone camera placing. Along side the lens of the camera, a dual LED flash is on the right of it.
On the bottom section, a speaker grille is provided at the left side with the product labels in the middle. That’s only where you can see the “Powered by Huawei” label little at the last.
Coming over to controls, the side of the device’s frame is completely empty with nothing more than a sticker with IMEI and Serial Number of the product. While on the right side of the device we have the volume rocker and the power/lock key.
In addition on the right side, the micro SIM slot and the micro SD card slot are also covered under the easily removable door. You can easily open that cover with your nail.
The back panel is not removable – hence the battery is not user-replaceable.
At the bottom, there is simply a micro USB (USB 2.0) socket present for PC connectivity and charging while the 3.5mm audio jack is provided on the top side of the device. There is also an IR blaster on the top to remote control your devices such as TV in your home or anything that support infrared remote control – detail is covered in the software/apps section of this review.
Huawei has offered dual-microphone in the Honor 6. The primary microphone (mouthpiece) is placed just besides the micro USB port on the bottom. An extra noise-cancellation microphone is also present on the top side of the phone.
Display Quality
Honor 6 comes with the 5″ display that is manufactured by JDI. It’s an LTPS display but does not come with Gorilla Glass protection – it was easy for the screen to get little scratches in just a few days. However, the oleophobic layer on the screen helps enough for the fingerprints to be wiped off easily. The screen was very smooth and soft like a good Gorilla Glass but it won’t protect from damages. I would have preferred some guaranteed protection on the Honor 6.
Honor 6 offers high performances in brightness and delivers appreciable visibility in bright outdoor conditions.
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| Display: Indoor visibility | Display: Outdoor visibility |
When talking about visibility in bright conditions, that’s only if not effected by direct sunlight and something in between to reflect on the screen. The display suffers at other viewing angles as well as it reflects heavily.
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| Display: a viewing angle | Display: heavy reflections |
The “Rog” Mode: 720p Switch
The 1080p FHD display on the other hand is much impressive on the Honor 6 offering great readability of documents and browsing web. In addition, a surprising “Rog” option in the settings lets you switch the resolution to HD 720p (1280×720) – well it saves more power.
It actually switches your phone to run on 720p resolution instead of the native 1080p. It requires a reboot to take affect each time you turn the switch on/off. It does not only scale the screen – The DPI of the OS is reduced as well as the whole graphic elements are effected. Technically it up-samples a pixel to 1.5px to plot 720p on the native 1080p resolution.
In result, you will get reduced sharpness and a little blurriness as well as you can easily tell the difference between the pixels densities with 720p and 1080p resolutions on the same 5 inch display. That’s (if not exactly) much like a phone with 5 inch screen and 720p resolution.
So what benefit you get? The answer is simple; You will convert your high-res smartphone to a low-end temporarily in favour of more battery life.
