Honor 6

In terms of look and build, the Honor 6 looks very similar to the Xiaomi Mi 4 (review). Like the Mi 4, the all white Honor 6 sports a unibody design with a glossy back panel and chrome tipped sides.While the exterior is all plastic, the frame is made of a durable aluminium alloy. To keep the smartphone from heating up, Huawei has added thermal gel, and two pieces of Panasonic Graphite, a material known for its thermal conductivity and heat spreading properties.We appreciate that Huawei has tried to cut down on bulk, by keeping the bezels around the display to the bare minimum, making the Honor 6 almost the same size as the iPhone 5s.     Above the screen, you’ll find a slim metallic grill that functions as the earpiece, flanked by the front camera 2MP on the right and the duo of sensors and multi-coloured notification LED on the left. The fascia is completely bare, since the Android buttons appear on the display as a software overlay.A uniform chrome bezel runs the length of the right and left spine, engulfing the top edge in the process. Even though it’s made of plastic, the matte finish ensures that it isn’t marred by smudges. On the top edge, you’ll find the 3.5mm headphone jack, an IR blaster and the secondary microphone. While the left spine is bare, the right houses the volume rocker on top, followed by the power button and a well camouflaged flap that hides the SIM and microSD card. The bottom edge sports the same white finish as the rest of the smartphone, and features the microUSB port for charging, along with the primary microphone.  Moving over to the rear, you’ll find the primary 13MP camera and dual-LED flash on the top left, and a vertical grill representing the loudspeaker at the bottom. There's also a Honor logo in the centre, but strangely Huawei’s own branding is missing from device. The shiny plastic back panel features a subtle dotted pattern underneath a transparent top layer. Unfortunately, it’s liable to get scratched and smudged easily, which left us wishing Huawei had opted for a matte-finish instead. Overall, despite the plastic finish, the Honor 6 feels like a well constructed, premium device.

Taking pride of place on the Honor 6 is the 5-inch display with full HD (1,080 x 1,920 pixels) resolution, equating to a jam-packed pixel density of 445ppi. Protecting the display is a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, as well as an oleophobic coating to keep smudges and fingerprints at bay. The display was stunning, to say the least. It’s bright, extremely sharp and very responsive, and was a delight to use. It’s equally good for gaming, watching videos or just typing, with no lags or jitters to mar the experience. While the high brightness levels make it legible in sunlight, it’s reflective nature can disturb viewing angles.  Going into the settings lets you adjust the colour temperature to your preference, and enable a Glove Mode for extra sensitivity.

The Honor 6 runs Huawei’s Emotion UI 2.3 on top of Android 4.4.2 KitKat. Emotion UI is packed to the brim with features, several of which will seem familiar if you've used Xiaomi’s MIUI. It offers a completely redesigned interface, a theme store and a ton of tools that power users will love, while maintaining the simplicity and smoothness of stock Android.

The Honor 6 is well equipped in the photography department, with a 13-megapixel Sony BSI sensor with dual-LED flash at the back, and a 5-megapixel snapper in the front.The camera app is straightforward, but by default it shoots in 16:9, which whittles the resolution down to 10MP. For the full 13MP resolution, you’ll need to change the aspect ratio to 4:3. The settings tab lets you enable a timer, touch to capture, smile capture, object tracking, ISO, white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation and brightness. You can configure the volume key to enable a variety of functions, using it to zoom, capture photos, focus or take a video. When the screen is locked, you can even program it to open the camera with a double press.There are three main shooting modes – Normal, Smart and Beauty. Then there's an interesting Watermark mode, which applies a small text and image overlay on your photo, which can be customised with text of your choice. There are 10 different watermarks available, with some letting you add the date, time and location info too. The Audio Control mode takes a photo when your voice reaches a high decibel level, while Audio Note records up to 10 seconds of audio after you take a photo. Best Photo takes 10 successive snaps, and chooses the best one to save. All Focus is similar to Nokia’s Refocus tool, letting you take a photo and change the focus area later. The usual Panorama and HDR modes and array of filters are also available.The front camera has a special mode for selfies. After you press the shutter button, it starts a countdown timer (you can specify the time in settings), and opens up a small “Selfie Window” directly under the camera, ensuring that you’re looking directly at the lens. There’s even a toggle to increase screen brightness to make low light selfies look better. For “groupies”, the front snapper has a wide-angle 16:9 mode, but this brings the resolution down to 3.8MP.The primary camera can record video in 1080p, and supports the Beauty Mode, Object Tracking and even HDR.When it comes to results, the cameras were a mixed bag. The primary camera is quick to focus and offers pleasing macro results. Landscape shots are very sharp, even when zoomed in. However, colours are washed out, making photos look very drab. At night, the camera is able to capture a surprisingly good detail, without much grain. The front camera is fixed focus, but can take a good selfie.Here are some image samples from the primary camera. Click on the thumbnails to view them in full resolution. 

Powering the Huawei Honor 6 is the company’s custom HiSilicon Kirin 920 chipset, which has made its debut on this smartphone. Based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, it consists of four Cortex-A15 cores clocked at 1.7GHz, and four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.3GHz. This enables the processor to be more power efficient, but also allows it to use both clusters simultaneously when required. For graphics, the Kirin 920 is equipped with a Mali-T628MP4 quad-core GPU and a meaty 3GB of RAM. Additionally, the processor features a Cat6 LTE modem, one of the first to be commercially available.