We go hands-on with the Honor 6 Plus!
Today, we literally froze our butts off to witness the official unveiling of the Honor 6 Plus, the company’s newest flagship under their Honor lineup. The Honor 6 Plus has plenty of good things going for it, least of which is its stellar price. The Honor 6 Plus promises to deliver performance that mimics that of an SLR with its unique dual-camera setup.
Huawei Honor 6 Plus
- 1.8GHz octa-core Kirin 925 processor
- 2GB/3GB of RAM
- 5.5-inch JDI full HD IPS-NEO screen, 1920 x 1080
- 16/32GB of storage, expandable via microSD
- Dual 8-megpixel rear camera with dual LED flash
- 5-megapixel front camera
- Dual-SIM, dual LTE
- WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC
- 3600mAh battery
- Android 4.4 KitKat with Emotion UI
Hands-on, first impressions: beautifully crafted smartphone with really innovative dual-camera setup
Huawei’s Honor lineup started last year as an experiment to fight rival Xiaomi in their home turf. Because the Honor line is perceived as the “cheaper” alternative to Huawei’s regular smartphones, people may think that the device is shoddily built to lower the price to where it is. That’s not true – in fact, the Honor 6 Plus is one of the nicest smartphones that Huawei has ever made. It uses a tough metal alloy in its construction which makes it pretty durable – at least durable enough to be shot with an air rifle with a metal BB and survive, as you can see in the video below uploaded by GizmoChina below.
Much like the iPhone 6 Plus, which, if you haven’t guessed already is the company’s main target, the Honor 6 Plus posesses a 5.5-inch display. In the Honor 6 Plus’ case, it’s a full HD JDI IPS-NEO display. Unlike the iPhone 6 Plus, the Honor 6 Plus is much smaller, and has a better screen to body ratio compared to the iPhone 6 Plus. As far as the actual display goes, it’s one of the sharpest we’ve ever seen on a smartphone even
though the device only has a full HD panel.
The main selling point of the Honor 6 Plus is the dual-camera setup on the back. Unlike the HTC One M8 camera configuration, the Honor 6 Plus has two 8-megapixel rear cameras set side-by-side, with both cameras capturing images which is different than HTC’s solution that used the second camera to capture depth information only.
While each camera only has 8-megapixel sensor, the two cameras working in unison are capable of producing 13-megapixel images. Slapping two cameras together requires a lot of extra effort to make the concept work, and Huawei made sure that the trouble was worth it. The two cameras working together allows the device to capture twice the light compared to a single camera, and when combined with the 1.98um sensor size ensures the device is able to capture photos even in low light.
Users can also shoot images with several F stops, and is able to go down to f0.98. Huawei’s also one-upped everybody else when in comes to refocusing tech after shooting an image – not only can you refocus your shot after shooting, you’re also able to change the F stop for some serious bokeh.
Under the hood lies Huawei’s own Kirin 925 octa-core processor. Huawei’s Kirin solution has managed to improve as of late, as evidenced by the performance of the company’s latest phablet, the Ascend Mate7. While we couldn’t check benchmarks on the Honor 6 Plus, we imagine its performance not too far off the Mate7, especially considering the hardware in the device.
The most impressive feature of the Honor 6 Plus is its price – in China, it hits retail at RMB 1990, or around Php 14,400. Granted the direct Php conversion isn’t going to be the same price it retails for in the PH, and it still remains to be seen what kind of pricing we’ll see for the international market. The device will hit the PH at Q1 of next year.
