In the last few years, cameras in smartphones have advanced by leaps
and bounds. But this improvement is a result of incremental updates. The
big updates have been few. Nokia did its bit to progress imaging, but
apart from it no one is really reinventing the wheel.
A couple of
years ago a little known company called Lytro introduced light-field
technology, which introduced refocussing capabilities in an image. HTC
last year followed suit with a similar concept on the One (M8), but it
failed to impress. Now Chinese smartphone vendor Huawei is making an
attempt at reinventing the wheel with its Honor 6 Plus. The focus, pun
intended, is again on the refocussing technology, which may help
smartphone shooters get better bokeh in images. Huawei has made some
lofty claims about the capabilities of the camera on Honor 6 Plus. We
put the phone through the paces. Read on to find out if it's any good.
Design and build quality
Let's
not beat around the bush. The Honor 6 Plus reminds us a lot of the
iPhone 4. At the same time, it borrows a number of design elements from
Sony's Xperia Z3.
It is amazing that we are still seeing phones
that are inspired by the iPhone 4, which was launched way back in 2010.
The Honor 6 Plus is certainly an attractive phone, but there's nothing
original about the design. By this we mean you get a geometric metal
frame sandwiched in glass on the both sides.
Yes, it's slim at
7.5mm and weighs 165 grams, which is fine for a 5.5-inch phablet, but
the iPhone 4 design language does not convert to great ergonomics on a
phone that's as big as the Honor 6 Plus. It's big and clunky to hold.
Its sharp lines dig into the palms and generally the phone is not the
most comfortable one to hold.
If you are not careful chances are
you may drop the phone. Considering the glass back, this does not bode
well for the longevity of the phone.
However, the build quality is
strikingly good. It is absolutely exquisite. The fit and finish of
everything from the buttons on the side to the SIM trays feels top notch
- right up there with a phone like the iPhone.
It's a dual-SIM
phone, so it has twin trays. One tray is for a nano-SIM slot, which also
doubles as a microSD card slot, while the other SIM slot is for
microSIM.
Overall, the phone has a great build quality. The design is neat, albeit a compromised and unoriginal one.
Display
Huawei
is using a gorgeous 5.5-inch 1080p screen on the Honor 6 Plus. The
company claims a 73.2 per cent screen to body ratio, which seems
correct. Overall, we found the display to be of a very high standard.
It
shows rich and punchy colours, which pop out. Brightness levels and
viewing angles too are very good. Like Xiaomi, Huawei's use of excessive
bright colours in the UI adds to the vibrance of the screen, which
makes it look similar to AMOLED screens even though it uses a LCD panel.
The
screen is good for watching videos and as well shows crisp text.
Moreover, its legibility under sunlight is decent, so one can actually
get work done with this phone even in the searing and extremely bright
sunlight.
Camera
The
Honor 6 Plus earns its, ahem, honour due to its camera. Or to be
precise, the pair of stacked 8-megapixel sensors on the back that work
in concert to provide refocussing capabilities like a Lytro camera.
Using
a wide aperture mode, on the Honor you can open up the aperture up to
as wide as f/0.95, which ensures insane level of depth of field. This
sounds a lot like the capabilities of HTC One (M8), which paired a
4-Ultrapixel sensor with a depth sensor, however the results are
completely different. And that is evident in the shot clicked with the
Honor 6 Plus because it is capable of shooting some stunning shots.
In
the camera app there is a depth of field slider, which allows you to
manually control the aperture, hence increasing or decreasing the
'bokeh' effect to get the perfect shot. Of course, this is strictly
meant for subjects that are not moving because the results will not be
as nice if you are trying to shoot a moving vehicle.
Even in the
normal mode, the rear camera performs very well. It takes shots with
lots of detail, accurate colours and minimal noise. In low light, the
performance does not rival that of the iPhone 6, but here we have a
camera which still does a darn good job.
Thanks to the twin
sensors, the Honor 6 Plus also captures large pixels. It has 1.98um
pixels. The large size ensures decent low-light performance.
Long
story short, the Honour 6 Plus has a really nice camera. It may not
compete with the iPhone 6 or the Lumia 1020, but it sure can hold its
own against some of the Android flagships. In fact, if you look at the
wide aperture mode, then the depth of field effects are almost like an
DSLR with a prime lens.
Of course, it is not perfect. In some
cases when the focused subject is far, it distorts image as it is not
able to resolve the information supplied by the twin lens.
At the
front there is an 8-megapixel sensor that takes some nice selfies.
Importantly, on the top left corner, the camera instructs you to look
into a small box, ensures that you are looking into the lens for the
selfie, something that doesn't happen all the time. Often, the lens is
not visible.
The phone also shoots 1080p video, but the quality of
videos is disappointing. There's a software based stabilisation mode,
but it does not do a good job. While colours and focusing is fine, the
footage is often shaky. The audio quality, however, is decent.
Software
The
Honor 6 Plus runs on Android 4.4 KitKat running Huawei's Emotion UI
3.0. Like other Chinese brands, the Honor has a UI that seems like a
blend of what Apple's iOS offers and the capabilities one gets with
Android. There is no separate app drawer. There is only a springboard of
apps that is home to both widgets and app icons.
It is a
simple UI and most of the core apps are nicely redesigned.
Interestingly, there is even a quick settings menu that launches from a
bottom swipe. The notifications pane is also similar to iOS and overall
if we had to compare it to an Android skin then we have to say it looks
very similar to the UI on the Vivo X5 Max.
Largely, the UI is
simple and highly customisable as it supports themes. It also feels
quite nimble in operating something that many of these custom Android
implementations do not.
Performance
The
Honor 6 Plus does not use processors from Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek
or even Intel. It uses Huawei's own Hi-Silicon 925 SoC which is paired
with 3GB of RAM. The phone also has 32GB of internal storage and a
microSD card slot. Now, this chipset is an all Huawei solution based on
an octa-core architecture with four ARM Cortex A15 cores and four ARM
Cortex A7 cores.
By modern standards this is not exactly
revolutionary, but the performance of the phone is fantastic. We could
multitask with much ease and could have more than 15 apps open without
any stutters or lags. Navigation of the user interface was also silky
smooth.
The phone also ran pretty cool, so we don't have any concerns about it over heating.
Call quality of the phone
was fine. Our initial unit failed to recognise our nano-SIM for some
reason, but the new unit performed decently. We did not face unexplained
dropped calls as we tested the device on a Vodafone network in the
National Capital Region. The Honor 6 Plus is a dual-SIM phone which
supports 4G networks in the country, which just sweetens the deal.
Battery life
Apart
from the camera, another highlight of this phone is its big 3,600mAh
battery. No wonder, we easily managed a day and a half with medium to
heavy usage over the week we tested the product.
We are talking about 30 hours of usage without much trouble and it can last even longer if you are a frugal user.
Our
testing usage involved 2 hours of phones calls, two email accounts, two
social media accounts, 15-20 photos on an average, 45 minutes of
streaming music while commuting, and 20 minutes of streaming videos on
YouTube. We also watched movies, browsed the web and played games like
Dead Trigger 2 for considerable stretches.
This is impressive battery performance.
Should you buy it?
For around
Rs.25,000,
the Honor 6 Plus makes a compelling case for itself. This holds truer
if you are interested in a phablet. Its camera alone is a feature that
will wow many, but moreover the device offers good performance, a great
screen and impressive battery life.
Frankly, there is nothing
wrong with the device. If you had to be overly critical then you'd
probably say that its design is uncomfortable and its user interface is
not very attractive when compared to stock Android Lollipop. On every
other aspects, the Honor 6 Plus gets everything right.
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