Honor Holly
After the impressive Honor 6 and not so great 3C, the firm backed by Huawei is bringing another existing smartphone to the UK.
There’s really not much to say about the design. This thing is about as close as you can get to a bog standard ‘candy bar’ smartphone. We’re not saying it looks bad, but it doesn’t exactly look exciting or stylish either. It just looks like a generic phone. In fact, it looks like a rounded version of Honor’s own 3C.
The Holly is one of the biggest budget phones we’ve seen, partly because it has a 5in screen, but also due to its chunky bezels. The back, home and menu buttons are off-screen, which is now unusual for an Android phone, and the menu has been replaced with recent apps.
A curved rear cover feels good in the hand, though, we’re not particularly keen on the shiny plastic. The cover comes off, so you can access the battery, dual-SIM slots and microSD cards slot.
This handset is neither thin nor light at 9.4mm and 156g. This is understandable considering the budget price tag, but not compared to rivals including the Moto E and EE Kestrel which are far more desirable.
The 5in screen is a good size and has a good HD 720p resolution. Many go for qHD instead, so a pixel density of 294ppi is a good result, and the display is IPS so viewing angles are good. Brightness is also decent if you feel the need to crank things up but it’s not all good news.
The display is set back from the screen a little, which feels odd. You’ll get used to it, but there’s a bigger problem. The glass front attracts grease and quickly gets smeared creating a very distracting moiré effect. It’s a bit like a digital oil slick of blue, red and green pixels, which is most noticeable when the screen is white so normally when browsing the web.
Inside is the same MediaTek 1.3GHz quad-core processor and Mali-400MP2 GPU found in the 3C. However, its 1GB of RAM is half that of its sibling. There’s no surprise that it benchmarked similar but strangely outpaced its sibling in the SunSpider web browsing test where lower is better. We think this is down to the 3C running older Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, while the Holly is on 4.4 KitKat.
From a user perspective, performance is good – better than you might expect for a phone this cheap. It’s by no means slick but you can play games like Temple Run 2 with no major issues and web browsing is smoother than we thought it would be. There is the occasional delay when launching apps and the like but it’s almost on a par with the Moto G.
Although the Holly has less RAM than the 3C, it bizarrely has more internal storage. It offers twice as much, in fact, at 16GB and there’s still a microSD card slot for adding up to 32GB more should you need it.
The Honor Holly has dual-SIM slots so you can use two different cards at the same time. You can still just use one but it makes the phone a cheap option for anyone looking for a handset with this feature.
You get basic 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and A-GPS. Importantly there is no 4G support so you’ll need to look elsewhere if this is a must.
The removable battery is 2000mAh. Although this isn’t big, we found the Holly lasted well and will easily get you through a day or more as long as you don’t go too hard on it with video and gaming.
At 8Mp, the rear camera on the Honor Holly sounds impressive – that’s the same resolution as the iPhone 6. However, it’s not as simple as that. It can’t match up to premium phones, though, the results are pretty good. There’s an HDR mode and we found the Holly could take photos quickly although the auto focus does struggle a fair amount. An LED flash is a nice addition for a budget phone and video can be recorded at Full HD.
At the front is a 2Mp camera which is lower resolution than the 3C’s impressive 5Mp selfie cam but it offers a good amount of detail.
The Holly runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat, which isn’t the latest version but this isn’t a brand-new phone – just to the UK. The firm uses Huawei’s Emotion UI 2.3 and although the Honor 6 has been updated to version 3.0,
The user interface is lightweight, using the stock notification bar and quick settings. However, there are a number of areas where we’re not so impressed. For starters, you must swipe down to unlock the Holly which is unnatural compared to other user interfaces.
The Emotion UI also ditches the traditional app menu, so all your icons must be stored on the homescreen panels like iOS.
Verdict
The Honor Holly might not look stylish and have brick-like proportions but it does offer a large HD screen, dual-SIM slots, expandable storage and good battery life.