Honor Holly

There’s not much to say about the Honor Holly’s design. It’s simple, sturdy and no-frills, which is great if all you care about is functionality. If not, you might be hard pressed to find reasons to call it pretty.

Huawei has been boasting about the the Honor Holly’s display, and with good reason. The combination of a roomy 5-inch screen size and HD resolution are a rarity at this price point, with only the Salora Arya Z2 offering the same. Huawei’s bragging rights end there though. The display doesn’t come with Gorilla Glass or Dragontrail protection, making it easily susceptible to getting scratched, as we noticed in our short time with the device. The lack of an OGS panel makes the text and icons appear recessed, and sensitivity isn’t the best we’ve come across either.

In the photography department, the Holly sports an 8MP primary camera with a Samsung BSI sensor and f/2.0 aperture, as well as a 2MP front snapper for video calls. The camera app’s UI is a standard affair. When viewed in landscape orientation, the left panel displays controls for normal, Live Photo, Face Beauty and Panorama modes. The top right has a quick-access button to toggle HDR, as well as controls to switch cameras and adjust the flash. In settings, you can tweak exposure, ISO and white balance, as well as choose various scene and colour effects. Shooting modes include voice capture, smile shot, self timer and continuous shot.

We had a lot of things to say about Huawei’s Emotion UI in our Honor 6 review, most of them positive. Unfortunately, while the Honor Holly runs the same version of EMUI, v2.3, it’s a stripped-down, bare-bones affair. On the Honor 6 (and the Honor X1 for that matter), Emotion UI looks and feels a lot like MIUI, in terms of design, controls and flexibility. On the Honor Holly, what you get is essentially a skin running on top of Android 4.4.2, which modifies the look and feel of stock Android, but not much else.

Powering the Honor Holly is a quad-core MediaTek MT6582 processor clocked at 1.3GHz, paired with 1GB of RAM and Mali 400-MP2 graphics. We’ve seen this combination on several budget handsets in the past, and it’s a fairly reliable configuration. More intensive gaming titles like Riptide GP2 play without any lags or freezes, but the device tends to heat up after a few minutes of gameplay. Popular games like Subway Surfers play without any glitches.