Remember Honor 5X? The phone was released last year and did quite well here in India. Now the company has released the Honor 6X, upgraded version of 5X. What did all change? Well, it has quite of few changes over 5X, especially in the camera department. The competition is sky high in the midrange smartphone category ( sub 15k ). Is it the best smartphone under 15000 Rs? Let’s find out in the full review of Honor 6X.
Honor 6X Review
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Design and Build Quality
Honor 6X design isn’t unique but the build quality is top-notch. The back is made of metal which is surrounded by the plastic on the edges. The front panel is plastic and has a curved design on the back. The phone feels solid in hand and we are satisfied with the ergonomics it offers.
The fingerprint sensor is on the back and 3.5 mm jack on top ( yes it has a dedicated 3.5 mm jack 😛 ). It has speakers at the bottom, the volume rockers and power button are on the right. The dual rear camera is eye-catching which is the highlight of this smartphone. It weighs 162g which is slightly heavier than it’s predecessor.
Display
Honor 6X sports a 5.5-Inch 1080P Full HD LCD display with 403 PPI. It has 71.8%Â screen to body ratio which is fair enough. The display is crisp, the colors pop out really well and we didn’t find any issues while watching videos too. The viewing angles are decent and the color reproduction is moderate which looks clean. Honor 6X skips capacitive navigation button and has on-screen buttons. The display is quite good even in the sunlight and auto brightness works like a charm.
User Interface ( UI )
The Emotion UI is similar to the other Chinese OEM’s without any app drawer. It runs on the latest Emotion UI 4.1 based on Android Marshmallow 6.0.1. The Emotion UI 4.1 is refreshed and is more fluid than previous versions. Honor has promised to release the Android Nought in the month of March.
Switching between the apps is smooth and you won’t face any lags. The one thing I didn’t like are the notifications where you to struggle to kill the notifications.
Features
- Hicloud: – To store the data on the cloud
- Smart Assistance: – To access Motion control, One-hand UI, voice control, and Floating dock. You can even customize the navigation buttons.
- Emergency Services: – To send emergency alert messages
- Health App: To track your fitness activities.
Camera
Honor 6X shoots dual rear cameras, a 12-megapixel+ 2 Megapixel with LED flash, 1/2.9 sensor size, 1.25 um pixel size, and phase detection focus. On the front, it has an 8-megapixel selfie camera.
Camera modes
- Pro Photo
- Beauty
- Pro Video
- Beauty Video
- HDR
- Night shot
- Paranoma
- Good Food
- Time lapse
- Light Painting
- Slow Motion
- Wide Aperture
Camera quality on Honor 6X is pretty good thanks it’s dual rear camera sensors. It has a decent depth of field and the color reproduction is very good. The Wide aperture mode helps you to capture bokeh shots with ease. Even after capturing the image, you can refocus the object according to your convenience. Sometimes the bokeh looks artificial where the focus is all over the place. I was impressed with the camera quality in low light conditions. The detailing is natural in default mode but lacks in wide aperture mode. The selfies turned out to be decent with good detailing. The beauty mode spices up a bit which clears your skin ( fake beauty :p ).
Performance
Honor 6X rocks a HiSilicon Kirin 655 Octa-core processor with Mali-T830MP2 GPU. The performance is much better than it’s predecessor but the competition is catching up with the likes of Redmi Note 4 and Coolpad Cool1. Initially, the performance was snappy but with the time and heavy apps, it got chopped down a bit. The gaming performance is good enough to play high-end games. I would recommend you to go for 4 GB RAM variant for better performance. The one I’m using is 4 GB RAM with 64-gigabyte storage and there is another 3 GB RAM variant with 32 gigs of storage. Overall the performance is just decent and could be improved after Nougat update.
Battery
This is where the Honor 6X has upper hand over its rivals. The battery performance is just amazing on this smartphone. Even though it has only 3450 mAh battery, the optimization helps the device to last longer than most phones out there. The phone can last a full day on heavy usage and expect a couple of days of normal usage on the ultra-saving mode.
Verdict
Honor 6X is one of its kind with a beautiful design and premium build quality. The dual rear camera is the most attractive part of this device. The battery performance is amazing, I feel it’s going to be one of the best selling phones in India. With the upcoming Nougat update, the performance will improve further.
