Honor 6 review - one month later

Honor6

As you readers might know, I've been using my Honor 6 smartphone for a month now. I've used it mainly for my google account services such as my blogs and also all my other social network account. It has also replaced my Lumia 925 as my primary shooter because of the extra megapixels I can get from every shot.

After a month, I think its about time for me to do a full review of the phone. This review is purely based on my own personal experience with the phone as my daily communication tools.

Introduction
Honor 6 was just launched in malaysia prior to my purchase through Vmall.my and from what i see the take up rate is very high for my country. I was so lucky as i manage to place my order on the website. I've actually created few post based on my experience with Vmall purchase and also my first impression during unboxing.

Honor 6 hardware spec is the one that pull me to this phone, as this might be the cheapest Octa core , 3Gb RAM and LTE phone available in my country. I must stress that i might be wrong, I wouldn't know of every phone spec that is currently available in the market.

For a quick recap, here is Honor 6 Spec,

	Operating System	Android 4.4
	UI	Emotion UI 2.3
	Software Upgrade	Upgrade and SD card support HOTA upgrade
	Voice assistant	Support
	Font size	Support
	Security features	Provide a harassment interception, rights management and other functions
	Features	Infrared remote control, put out the screen quick call, put out the screen snapshots, voice, find contacts, special effects filters, magazines lock screen, watermark camera, full-focus mode, rear camera supports hardware HDR
	CPU Model	Kirin 920
	CPU Cores	8-core
	CPU frequency	4xA7 1.3GHz 4xA15 1.7GHz
	GPU	ARM Mali T628MP4
	Keyboard Type	Virtual QWERTY keyboard
	Input	Touch

The good
Honor6 is a fast phone, very small delay or lag is felt when you open any app and the extra capacity on the 3GB ram is put to good used in multitasking. The display is bright even under bright sunlight and that Full HD 5" screen is a thing of a beauty.

Management tools such as rights management, phone manager, themes and backup is very intuative, it gets the job done in a simple manner. Notifications on this phone really helps to manage it day to day, it will notify user in every ciscumstances if you want or to only notify things that you would want to see only.

Extra feature such as suspend button (virtual on screen home button), motion control and glove mode help to give user option on how to interact with the phone depending on requirements. This options and others are easily accessible from the notification menu.

Battery life on Honor6 is very good but if you somehow have trouble finding a power source nearby, the Ultra battery saving feature is a life saver. Ultra battery saving feature would only allow calls, messages and contact access using a very basic interface in black and white. I've used it once when my battery was 7% and after an hour drive later to home, the battery is still at 7%.

LTE, nothing much to say, this phone support Cat6 LTE that can go up to 300mbps.Even though CAT6 LTE isn't available yet and LTE connection on my provider is not the best, but you never go wrong when having things for the future and furthermore the connection is stable.

The Bad
During my time with this phone, I'm having intermitten Wifi connectivity issue where the connection would drop suddenly. For someone that on limited data plan, it is not a good sign as the connection might drop from wifi to network even during video streaming. I managed to probably fix this after a few weeks later by disabling the Wi-Fi optimization in advance menu. Since then, the connection drop is less.

Update for EMUI 3.0 international is still not available even after weeks of availability for the Chinese market. There is always option to side load it but those option came with a price, some ROM can't connect to LTE while others just totally froze the phone.

Screen responsiveness is a little slow, this maybe my personal preferences after years of experience using iOS wth their fast screen response. I'm an avid gamer so having a slow responsive screen really annoy me sometimes.

The build quality of the phone is what you could expect from a reasonable priced phone and please get yourself phone casing as the side is easily scratch.

The other things that actually supprise me is the video capture. I've expected better quality with full HD video but I can get better quality video on my old Lumia 925 (720p) or my Ipad mini retina (720p). The video quality is not what you could expect from a full HD video and I think it is mainly because of the software. You can see a sample below and judge yourself.

Final words
I would recommend this phone to anyone looking for great hardware but competitive pricing. My only gripe with the phone is the video quality as felt it could be better with polished software. Honor 6 is rightly a flagship phone from Honor and the performance really is on par with any other flagship phone that my cost twice as much.

EMUI 3.0 would actually make this phone a more enticing proposition and hopefully Honor or Huawei would release the update as soon as possible.

I've also did some benchmark test with a group of freinds, you can read it here

If you owned one or thinking to own one, please leave a comment below as i would like to get other's feedback