Honor 6X First Impressions

Honor, Huawei’s youth-focused online-only brand, has been picking up steam in India with a series of popular phones, has announced that it will be launching the Honor 6X globally. We first saw this phone when it launched in China in October, and now the company has announced at CES 2017 that it will be coming to more markets soon, India included.

There will be two versions of the Honor 6X: one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. We can expect the lower-rung model to be priced comfortably under Rs. 15,000 when it goes on sale in India. Both will be available in grey, silver and gold.

We had a chance to spend some time with the Chinese units under embargo in Mumbai prior to the announcement, and we can now tell you what we were able to learn about the device. It’s targeted at young go-getters, and its main selling point is the twin cameras on the rear.

The Honor 6X has a metal back which is curved just right for a palm, but picks up smudges very easily. The front is also nicely curved at the edges, giving the Honor 6X a look that’s cohesive overall. Despite its 5.5-inch screen, this phone is comfortable enough to use with one hand. It uses on-screen Android navigation buttons so there’s very little space around the screen. There’s no pathbreaking design, but it does look and feel quite satisfying.

The power and volume buttons are easy to reach on the right, and there’s a fingerprint sensor on the back, right below the vertically arranged camera lenses. There’s a hybrid SIM tray on the left, which means you have to choose between storage expansion and a second SIM. There’s a single speaker and a Micro-USB port on the bottom, and a standard 3.5mm audio socket on the top.

The Honor 6X runs EMUI 4.1, which is based on Android 6.0. It’s a single-layered skin with no app drawer, and the large number of preloaded apps spread out over four pages makes it look rather cluttered. That said, the custom icons and graphics are all simple and polished, making this a lot easier to live with. There’s a heavily customised notification drawer with a neat timeline design and a separate tab for quick settings.

Performance is snappy, but we’ll have to wait till we can run some actual benchmark tests before we compare Huawei’s in-house Kirin 655 SoC to the more common Qualcomm and MediaTek offerings at this price level. There’s also a rather generous 3340mAh battery.

The 5.5-inch full-HD screen is sharp and saturated, and we were quite satisfied in our brief experience with it. While the primary rear camera has a 12-megapixel sensor, the secondary one is just 2 megapixels, and is used for depth sensing rather than actually capturing image data. This allows the Honor 6X to artificially create blurred backgrounds for a depth-of-field effect. It works best on close-ups, and while we could definitely tell the difference between images taken with this mode on and off, actual image quality remains to be seen.

The Honor 6X will be going up against some excellent phones, but it looks like it could be quite popular. Stay tuned to Gadgets 360 for our full review, and we’ll tell you whether or not to buy this phone when it goes on sale in India.