Honor 4X

The Honor 4X isn’t a premium smartphone like the Honor 6, but it’s still a well-built device. The 5.5-inch display puts it on the larger side, but its 8.7mm waistline makes it comfortable to use single-handed. The top layer of the smartphone is black, and you can choose either a white or black hue for the back panel. Our review unit was dressed in white, but we much preferred the black version we saw at MWC.

The 5.5-inch display on the Honor 4X gets 720p resolution, equating to a pixel density of 267ppi. The sharpness is on the lower side, but the brightness levels are good, making it legible even in sunlight. Colours are vibrant, but aren’t oversaturated like those on AMOLED displays. In settings, you can tweak the colour temperature to your liking. The large size of the display makes it ideal for playing games and watching videos, and we had no complaints on its responsiveness either.

The Honor 4X runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat, and gets Huawei’s Emotion 3.0 UI layered on top. We’ve already covered the latest version of Emotion UI in detail in our Honor 6 review, but we’ll nevertheless go over the main points again.

Photography is one of the most important features on any smartphone today, but not all manufacturers are able to get this right. One of the Honor 6’s pain points was its camera, and it’s unfortunate that the Honor 4X follows suit. Sure, the images are usable, both for personal use as well as social media, but they’re not as good the snappers we’ve seen on rival phones, like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G and YU Yureka. 

Ticking at the Honor 4X’s core is a 64-bit quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, paired with 2GB of RAM. The Honor 4X unit we used at MWC was powered by Huawei’s own octa-core Kirin 620 processor, but the reason Honor has used a Qualcomm chipset for India is so that it can support the country's LTE bands. As far as day-to-day performance is concerned, the phone able to handle multi-tasking without any hiccups. We also tested several games on it, including Subway Surfers, Zombie Highway 2 and our favourite, Riptide GP2, all of which played without any visible slowdown or lags. Unfortunately, Emotion UI 3.0 is slightly sluggish, which doesn't make the 4x seem as zippy as the Redmi Note 4G. Currently, the Honor 4X runs Android KitKat, but when an upgrade to the 64-bit compatible Lollipop is rolled out, it should technically improve performance further.