Huawei Honor 6X Review: Mid-range dual-cam, justified price

[nextpage title=”Introduction, Overview and Key Features”]

Introduction, Overview and Key Features

Huawei has supported its Honor sub-brand as extremely as it now seems to have made its space in competition. With the focus on its high-end P and Mate series, Huawei keeps launching Honor devices all the year. Recently launched Honor 6X has attracted customers mainly for its dual-camera configuration. This dual-cam smartphone has spent a few weeks with us — courtesy of Huawei, let’s see in the Honor 6X review what it actually has to serve you.

There is really no objection, what Huawei builds, it is as good with budget and mid-range as with a high-end device. Most of the time we liked the build quality of Huawei devices, Honor 6X is no different in that sense. However a phone has to serve more than just with its build and handling. We’ll sure inform you about how this piece of hardware performs.

You probably have already been aware that Honor 6X is available in Pakistan for the price of PKR 28,500/- officially. You can even find it for lower prices if you search the market near you or online. The lowest price we saw was on daraz.pk. Look out for the deals below.

Following the launch in China last year in October, Huawei launched the Honor 6X globally in January during CES. Sooner after, Huawei Pakistan made the phone available in Pakistan as well as the company invested much in its promotion.

⇒ Huawei Honor 8 Review

The phone has Huawei’s signature dual-camera configuration – not as impressive as we have seen in P9 or Honor 8. The phone is packed with a few features making it limited to its class, however the fingerprint scanner is also present.

Huawei Honor 6X – Key Features

• OS/Software: Android 6.0 Marshmallow, EMUI 4.1
• Processor/GPU: Kirin 655 – Octa core, ARM Mali T830-MP2
• Memory: 3GB RAM, 32GB Storage + microSD up to 128 GB
• Display: 5.5″ IPS Display, 1080p, 403ppi
• Weight: 162 grams
• Camera Rear: Dual 12MP + 2MP, PDAF LED Flash. 1080p @ 30 fps
• Camera Front: 8MP, 1080p @ 30 fps
• Battery: 3340mAh, non-removable, Rapid Charging
• Connectivity: 4G/LTE, Wi-Fi 2.4G/5G, Bluetooth 4.2, MicroUSB
• Other Features: Fingerprint Scanner, Dual Camera.

If you want, you can checkout the full specifications of Honor 6X here.

Honor 6X – Box Content

Honor 6X comes in a simple pop-out packaging with blue box. Inner box contains those standard compartments for accessories like charger, USB cable and stereo headset. The retail box also ships with a silicon back case and a simple transparent protective film.

Video: Honor 6X – Unboxed and an Overview

[nextpage title=”Build, Design and Display”]

Build, Design and Display

With its visuals, Honor 6X does look somewhat above a mid-range smartphone. With a metal rear side curved at both ends (left/right) slightly rounded and joining into the plastic frame of the phone, it seems pretty handful.

The top and bottom on the back are plastic covers, probably one of them serves to disassemble the phone (by some expert of course), Not a fully unibody design but it has still no option to remove back cover or replace battery by consumers themselves.

Right there on the back, fingerprint scanner follows Huawei’s long standing design language for most of their smartphones. Above it, there is a dual-camera system along side an LED flash.

The phone is much handy and you could feel comfortable with it. Metal on the back however is not that appealing. It feels like just a thin layer of tin which might get dent with a little pressure of your thumb-nail (provided it’s hard like mine.)

⇒ Huawei Mate 9 Quick Review

Put that little objection aside because you are not looking at a real high-end device at all. But for the price, this thing is good. It’s not that it will break apart, you can feel solidity of the phone as it’s not that loose from within. In fact Honor brand is all about delivering a piece of hardware in good price.

On the front, the 5.5 inch display is larger than a normal smartphone display size but Honor 6X has managed to keep it within the boundaries. Average sized hands would need to turn on the one-handed operation in the phone for easiness.

Bottom only serves with the brand name while the top portion of the front panel hosts a front-facing camera, some sensors and of course the earpiece.

Ports and Components

Observing the other components, you can find the 3.5mm audio jack on top of the phone on a side and a secondary mic on the other side. A speaker grill is down there on the bottom of the phone, and along side there is microUSB port. The other grill hosts a primary mic (mouthpiece.)

On the right side of the device you have a volume rocker and a power button, while on the left there is only a SIM/microSD slot.

What we didn’t like was the old microUSB port instead of the most adapting USB Type-C. Looks like Huawei has a lot of old components to finish with and a lower mid-range devices will sure be the good candidates for that.

In an overall sense, there is nothing to bash the design as well as no praising elements are there. In simple, you can say that Honor 6X is not something to attract customers. Colors availability of the phone is also very simple in gold, gray and silver.

Honor 6X – Display

You already know that Honor 6X has a large display of 5.5 inches. With the resolution of 1920×1080 pixels the display serves at the pixel density of ~403ppi which is good indeed. Color accuracy is pretty much better than its predecessor. Brightness and viewing angles are also not less than better.

It’s an LTPS  display which is better than other LCD options. Let alone the official numbers – as 10% more efficient than before, Honor 6X was really good in practical use with its display quality. Readability was sharp and crisp.

Software seemed to be somewhat confused with observing ambient light to handle the auto-brightness. It some times stuck at a brightness level unreasonably – but however tapping on the auto to toggle it again fixes the brightness accordingly.

The phone has a sunlight readability mode that, when enabled, the software works with the contrast and temperature values to adjust the display better visible in bright sunlight. It’s not that good however when compared to some AMOLED displays.

Overall, there shouldn’t be any objection with the display of Honor 6X. It’s better or at least competitive in its price range.

[nextpage title=”Software and Performance”]

OS / Software

Once again, Honor 6X runs the old Android 6 Marshmallow with proprietary EMUI 4 which is mostly disliked in the crowd out there. There are various issues people think as of, mainly the lack of app drawer and some also report it to have bloatware or junk apps out of the box.

To me seriously? Even though, those two things are key elements in Android which respectively are better to have or skip, I think the former is a personal choice to reject a system. I like it that way, anyway. Huawei might think to avoid any junk apps as well.

In fact, EMUI offers a lot to handle your phone with most of the aspects applications run in the background. Phone Manager is an important item with the Huawei smartphone.

The good thing is that this phone is set to receive EMUI 5 based on Android 7.0 Nougat software update. It might be just an update for most phones but for Huawei and Honor devices, it’s a leap.

EMUI 5 is a huge set of changes within the system and user interfaces of the whole experience, whether it’s the design and layout or the notification panel. The new software now has a most wanted feature – an app drawer.

Right now, out-of-the-box, Honor 6X won’t have these things but expect to receive the software update sooner or later. However there is no problem with the old EMUI at all if you are not to curious about app drawer, it works fine.

The bloatware is not something that most Chinese smartphones use to ship with. You can however delete them right as you would normally do.

User interface is not different than any of the other EMUI 4 offerings. There are only home screens that can be rearranged in anyway how the users like. There are ways how the home screens swipe through, there are widgets which we can add into home screens along side the app icons and folders. You can switch from 4 columns grid view to 5 columns if you prefer. But as you know there is no separate app-drawer, all the apps will appear on the home screens and you could uninstall them right as you would from an app drawer.

Lock screen can be customized with Magazine style which shows a different wallpaper whenever you wake the phone from sleep. Swiping in any direction the the screen gets unlocked but swiping from the bottom edge, a set of quick controls and shortcuts appear. Along with a standard pin code or pattern unlock feature, the fingerprint security is there to take you straight to the home screen without even showing the lock screen.

Home Screens and Features

Home screen offers with multiple walls of app icons and a sticky bottom row that serves with the feature to use for most frequent functions of the phone e.g. Calling, Messaging, Internet browsing etc. You can customize that however.

Swiping anywhere on the home screen, but not from top-edge, initiates the search feature that provides search box on top with recently used apps or functions below it. This feature searches through everything on the phone, in contacts, in messages, in emails, in apps, in settings etc. If you don’t find anything, it also provides a link to search online for the keyword you have put in.

Notifications and Shortcuts

Notification center can be pulled down from the top status bar that brings two sections. There are shortcuts in the right tab, and the notifications on the left.

The third screen above is customization section that opens right from the shortcuts section and serves with all the available shortcuts where the upper half lists the shortcuts which are currently present on the main shortcuts section (middle screen above). The shortcuts in the lower half are unused which can be dragged to the upper half to display in the main shortcuts section.

It’s pretty much same across EMUI 4.1 in other Huawei devices as well.

[nextpage title=”Camera, 12MP Rear Dual-Cam, 8MP Front-Cam”]

12 Megapixel Dual Camera

The year 2016 has brought a lot of smartphone that featured dual-camera configuration functioning quite differently. Huawei, for sure, is one to adapt the feature so aggressively that it shipped not only in high-end but, with this Honor 6X, in mid-range as well.

Honor 6X is also the first and currently the only smartphone in this price range to feature dual-camera setup. If you have read about dual-camera configuration, you would know that one of them is actually the primary camera that works in most scenarios. Secondary camera is what supports the functioning of the setup to work differently.

If you have looked through our reviews of Honor 8 or even Huawei P9, they worked the same way with one RGB and the other monochrome image sensor. Mate 9 also has the similar setup but the monochrome sensor is higher in resolution than the RGB sensor. On the other hand iPhone 7 Plus has wide and telephoto camera setup.

This mid-range Honor 6X is somewhat different. It has a 12 megapixel primary snapper while the secondary camera is only 2 megapixel. The secondary unit is only used for depth mapping to simulate background blur effect (bokeh).

Native Camera – User Interface

First thing about a camera is that how’s the experience you control it on a smartphone and on Android, you’ll find a lot user interfaces of camera from different phone makers. I’d say Huawei’s native camera interface is simple to use as well as broader in feature set. It follows the user experience from its previous iterations – if you have used it in recent years, you know what it’s like.

Main viewfinder screen with a quick shutter button and a video mode toggle button at the bottom along side a gallery shortcut button. On the top side of the viewfinder there’s an array of buttons for quick access to flash, filters, a rear/front camera switch and the aperture mode switch.

Swiping left-to-right on the viewfinder reveals the modes you can use with the Honor 6X, while swipe the other way to reach settings for the currently selected mode. In still photos, the 12MP camera provides full resolution at 4:3 aspect ratio while the maximum video resolution is 1080p. The phone doesn’t support RAW shooting format and only gives you the compressed JPEG format in still photos.

As mentioned above the secondary 2MP camera is only for shallow depth of field, it’s used only when you turn on the wide-aperture mode. It’s not used in any other mode, and you can verify that by covering the lens and feeling nothing on the viewfinder. If you do that in wide-aperture mode, you will be notified.

What’s beautiful in Huawei’s camera UI is the Pro Photo mode with extensive manual controls for quite a long. Features like manual shutter speed, ISO, metering and focus are much common now but controlling white balance manually with kelvin temperature scale is too good in smartphone.

What’s not so beautiful is the aperture mode which is not not part of Pro Photo mode and works separately. Wonder if Huawei put the feature in Pro Photo mode because currently the aperture mode is not fully a pro. You can’t change exposure, ISO and other things like in Pro Photo mode.

Other modes include Beauty, HDR, Night shot, Panorama, Good food, Light painting, Time-lapse, Slo-mo, Watermark, Audio note and Document scan. Pro and Beauty modes are also available for Video recording while the Slo-mo mode only records VGA resolution of 640×480 at just 60fps.

Still Photo Performances

The performance of the camera was pretty good how it managed to keep low noises with well detailed image. But that’s somewhat limited to outdoors only, as the indoor shots weren’t that much sharp. Overall, the colors rendering wasn’t quite impressive as they were dull in most cases.

Indoor/Outdoor Shots

Flash/non-Flash Shots

Night Shots

The bad thing is that this phone was marketed focusing on its camera, and that’s exactly what I couldn’t test. The unit we had from Huawei for testing, didn’t seem quite well on its focus capability. It didn’t work auto with tap-to-focus feature, neither it worked in the manual focus in Pro Photo mode.

Focusing is the major element in a camera that has to work fine for sharp photos. While shooting subjects or scenes far away weren’t a problem with this unit of Honot 6X as the infinity focal point seemed to work well. So in most of the cases when I shot outdoors or indoors with subjects further away, it worked just fine.

The dual-camera configuration to simulate the shallow depth of field in photos was also not that impressive. It always looked artificial whether the focal point was on foreground subject or on the background. It was fine at some cases though when the aperture was set at around f/2 on the subject a meter away. Focusing on the close subjects was already not possible with this unit so it might be a problem with this unit only as other seemed to work fine with no problem at all.

Aperture Mode

Video Sample

I can only give you one short video sample recorded during a drive. You can check how the camera performs during different light and shadows.

8 Megapixel Front-Facing Camera

8MP front-facing camera was also quite good with nice detail on the closer subject. Dynamic range is not that good with highlights clipping with a little difference in light.

[nextpage title=”Battery and Performance”]

Battery and Performance

Running inside Honor 6X is the Kirin 655 – the proprietary mid-range processor of Huawei. Along it’s helped by a 3GB RAM or a 4GB RAM, however we are dealing with a 3GB variant here as the other model is not available. The package actually gives an impressive push to the phone’s performance.

Throughout our usage, Honor 6X performed flawlessly during regular use, calling, texting, or browsing. Social apps like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp were fluid and responsive. In fact graphically intensive games also worked fine – if ignore a few hiccups. In its price, this performances is appreciable.

Not quite up to match the high-end numbers in benchmark scores, but they are good enough to stay up among its class.

Battery

Battery life of Honor 6X is also something you shouldn’t worry about. While 3340mAh battery is claimed to have two days with moderate usage and one and a half day with heavy usage, company’s rating is usually far from regular usage of a phone. 36 hours (or 1.5 days) in practical usage was pretty much acceptable for moderate use of Honor 6X – a little gaming and a few videos offline/online also included.

Extensive usage of the phone with highly needy games, continuous videos, a GPS navigation of a few minutes and shooting with camera pretty frequently, Honor 6X could leave you in 15 hours or so. A little less and controlled usage will still give you a day so that you can come back and get your phone charged.

Battery timing on Huawei devices are usually good as I really feel EMUI is an optimized flavor of Android. Ultra battery saving is yet there to save you with urgent needs of the phone for calling and texting.

[nextpage title=”Verdict and Conclusion”]

Verdict and Conclusion

Finally, the chapter you want to read is our recommendation. So simple and straight opinion would be it’s nice mid-range smartphone with pretty much good features and specially its performance. It didn’t let me down even once, I am not talking about the mishap of having a faulty camera focus issue. Mostly I have learnt that it’s alright.

The price you pay for it is justified as Honor 6X is not like many Huawei smartphone which are crazily over priced – don’t know why. Like previously Nova Plus was just  like that where Honor 8 or One Plus 3T was most recommended in its price range. Honor 6X is just a nice option in for its price.

Camera of Honor 6X is not that great to praise, but it’s not that bad as well. In addition the camera features like aperture mode and manual control are pretty awesome for this price.

I just forgot to mention about its fingerprint scanner, well that’s quite fast to be in a mid-range smartphone. Huawei is better with its decent offering mid-range devices too – that’s commendable.

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