Huawei launched its budget smartphone, Huawei Y6s earlier this month in Pakistan. We did an unboxing session and gave our first impressions, you might want to check if you haven’t already. Today, a more comprehensive review of Huawei Y6s is here. This review will focus on the phone’s system, battery and camera performance.
If you had pre-ordered this phone, you’d have to pay only 20,099 Pakistani rupees. But the time is up now and the retail price is now Rs. 20,899.
Screen & Display
With this price, you get a screen size is 6.09-inch that comes with an IPS display panel. The phone has only a 720p HD+ resolution and 283 PPI pixel density is enough in this price. I usually have to enable Eye-Comfort mode in most phones. Other brands call this feature with their own terminology, e.g. Blue Light Filter in Samsung phones, or Eye Protection Mode in Vivo smartphones.
Thanks to TUV Rheinland certified screen, that Huawei Y6s’s display blocks out blue light out of the box. I didn’t need to turn on Eye-Comfort mode on this phone. Still, if you want you can turn it on to have a more yellow tint.
With the 720p resolution, the sharpness won’t be better than any budget smartphone. But the brightness of this phone literally impressed me.
Internal Features
If we talk about the internals of the phone. Then it comes with MediaTek Helio P35 chipset. It’s based on 12-nanometer architecture. The chip employs eight cores of Cortex A53 which are basically power-efficient cores. So to boost some performance, four of these cores are clocked at 2.3GHz. The other four cores are clocked at 1.8GHz to save energy a perform day to day tasks.
To give the phone some power to handle graphics, there is a PowerVR Rogue GE8320 GPU. The phone has a 3GB RAM with 64GB internal storage. microSD card support is available for up to 512GB.
Software and Interface
If we talk about Software and User Interface, This phone comes with an Android 9 Pie operating system. On top, you will get Huawei EMUI 9.1 user interface. All the app icons are on the home screen by default, however, you can enable app drawer too if you want.
System Performance
If we talk about performance, then this is just a budget phone but it didn’t perform badly in this price category. I didn’t face any problem in day-to-day usage. There was occasionally a lag in scrolling interfaces. I believe, it can be fixed via a software update.
This phone performs on a basic level with Gaming. Racing games like Asphalt 9 won’t make trouble for the phone. When I tried PUBG mobile it played on Low graphics by default. You can choose a higher graphics level but it won’t be recommended for a better and smooth experience. HD graphics aren’t available on this phone at all.
With respect to real-time usage, this phone can be considered good with Helio P35 chipset. If we look at the benchmark scores, then on Geekbench 4, it scored 843 on single-core test. While on multi-core test, it scored 3739. The phone impressively scored 96,432 on AnTuTu.
That’s a good score in this price range. If you want even better performance, then you won’t get in this price.
Power Management
This phone comes with a 3,020 mAh battery capacity. Along with that, we get only a 5-watt charger, which is really not acceptable. Fortunately, the charging is not limited at 5-watt. So that means, this phone can be charged at 10-watt with any 2-ampere charger. That’s a good thing at least but still, a bundled 2-ampere charger would have been better.
One thing that I mentioned in the unboxing session too, is that Huawei needs to stop shipping this UK-region 3-legs charger. It would better have a localized 2-legs charger in Pakistan.
If we talk about battery life then 3,020 mAh capacity isn’t really competitive at this price. We are no use to have at least 4000 mAh battery in mid-range or even budget smartphones. Still with a fully charged battery, this phone lived on for a whole day. But only if you don’t exhaust it with gaming all day.
Camera
Then this phone doesn’t come with a gimmicky dual-cam setup. Simply there is a single camera unit on the back with a 13MP image sensor and f/1.8 lens aperture. A single selfie camera is on the front side with an 8MP sensor and an f/2.0 aperture lens.
As long as camera quality is concerned, image detail is good but not so impressive. Highlight clipping can be seen usually in high-contrast scenes. But occasionally, the phone handled the dynamic range nicely. Whenever it did not, the HDR mode came in handy.
Color reproduction was mostly accurate but also sometimes it went completely off. The white balance remained mostly consistent. The skin tone was also handled well by the camera.
I experienced a focus-lock issue mostly in portrait shots. Well, I am not talking about real portrait shots with the bokeh effect. Because this phone doesn’t come with any fancy camera modes.
And then the most important thing is that shutter-lag bothered me most of the time. This phone really needs a software update to fix that.
The phone supports 1080p full HD video recording. But that highlight clipping issue is widely present, in bright daylight. There is, of course, no stabilization as well but you can use Google Photos to stabilize the recorded videos – that works really well. Image detail is not above average in videos.
The front camera, on the other hand, performs well in good lighting. It was impressive, especially in bright daylight. But in low light conditions or indoor lighting, it wasn’t that great. Highlight clipping is present here also. But the front camera also produced skin tones nicely.
This is not some kind of mindblowing piece of hardware in this price range. But the plastic build is indeed a good quality as Huawei never let us down, that we know.
Wrap-up / Conclusion
I’ll say it again. If this black variant also had a dual-tone finish like the Orchid blue variant, it would have been much better. It’s a compact phone in handling but to offer in 20,000 rupees, Huawei compromised on three things.
- It didn’t provide a protective case.
- There are no bundled earphones.
- A trimmed down 5-watt charger
In a perfect world, I think this phone would be better if cost around Rs. 18,000. Still then, you won’t get any better phone in 20,000 rupees. The thing is your budget.
If you want a better phone, add four or five thousand rupees, and get a phone with Snapdragon 665.
But then again you can get even better options if you further add six or seven thousand.
So, if your budget is limited at 20,000 rupees, then you may get this phone.
For now, that’s it. If you liked this review, subscribe to our website and other social platform channels. Watch the video review on our YouTube and do like and share. If you have any questions regarding Huawei Y6s, ask in the comments below.
