Honor 6 Plus

The Honor 6 scored highly in our review late last year, and after a positive reception, Honor (a Huawei-owned brand) has decided to expand the range to cater for those who like bigger, phabletstyle smartphones.

The Honor 6 Plus is bigger than its Honor 6 sibling, with a 5.5in screen rather than the 5in screen. Aside from the size, though, the 6 Plus looks a lot like its smaller counterpart, with a metal band around the edge (which is real metal this time – an improvement over the Honor 6’s plastic frame), a glass back, and the same 7.5mm thin body. It weighs only 165g, too, so feels comfortable to hold and use, if a little slippery. We think it looks great overall, and would definitely fool you into expecting a much higher price tag.

The only small niggle we had with the design is that we kept picking it up and attempting to use it from the wrong side. Both sides of this smartphone feel identical thanks to that glass back, so you’ll often find yourself tapping on the rear of the device for a second until you look at what you’re doing.

The display is Full HD 1080x1920, giving it a pixel density of 401ppi, which is good for a mid-range smartphone and matches the iPhone 6 Plus’s Retina display. It’s brilliantly bright and crisp, so for anyone looking for a large smartphone that they can watch videos and movies on this is a worthy contender. We also like the fact that the image looks as though it’s laying directly on the surface. This is something that the iPhone 6 Plus doesn’t manage, so we’d go as far as to say that the screen on the Honor 6 Plus looks better than its Apple rival.

Inside the Honor 6 Plus is a Kirin octa-core 925 processor clocked at 1.8GHz and paired with 3GB RAM, and has proved to be a fairly fast smartphone. We carried out benchmark tests to determine the processor speed (Geekbench), graphics speed (GFXbench) and browser speed (SunSpider).

As you can see from the table below, the Honor 6 Plus manages to beat some flagship smartphones in the Geekbench tests, including the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s highly impressive for the price.

Graphics performance and SunSpider results aren’t as good, but still manage to stay on par with rivals that have higher price tags.

There’s 32GB of internal storage and support for microSD cards up to 128GB in size. Connectivity includes 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, dual SIM (though you’ll have to pick between that and the additional storage from microSD as it’s a combined slot), GPS and NFC.

The battery is non-removable, but is a good 3600mAh so should perform brilliantly, plus there’s a battery saving mode that’ll increase that. During testing, we found that the battery managed a good two days on one charge. Additionally, it can also charge other devices thanks to reverse charging.

Cameras

We were particularly impressed by the Honor 6 Plus’s cameras. On the front is an 8Mp camera, while on the rear are two 8Mp cameras that allow you to capture wide aperture images and change the focus later. It’s similar to the focusing feature found in HTC’s One M8, and worked exceptionally well during our testing with an adjustable aperture of f/0.95 to F/16. There’s a dual-LED flash, too, and video capabilities reach 1080p FHD.

The Honor 6 Plus is running Android 4.4 KitKat with Emotion UI, but it’s possible that a Lollipop update will arrive in the future. There aren’t any particularly outstanding software features, but it’s not completely vanilla. There’s no app drawer, for example, so you’ll have to rely on folders like you do in iOS which will appeal to some but not everyone. The Emotion UI’s graphic design also divides opinion, and is sometimes described as childish, but we enjoyed the ability to change the theme of the design, and there are many additional free themes to choose from.

In a nice extra touch, the image see on the lock screen will change every time you wake it from sleep, which we found we really enjoyed.

Verdict

For anyone looking for a smartphone with a large screen, the Honor 6 Plus is worth considering. It has great specs, a good-looking and sleek design and a decent camera, all at a surprisingly low price.