Review of Huawei Honor 6 Plus: A smartphone that changes the idea of ​​mobile photography — Sergei Villanov’s website

Huawei is one of those companies that are not shy. They are not shy about loudly boasting about numbers and small technical details, inviting Chinese actors and popular singers, albeit only in China, to the stage, and also publicly naming the names of competitors. At the presentation of the new flagship Honor, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4 were mentioned (and shown on the screen). And Honor 6 Plus, according to the information presented, was, naturally, better. In everything.

In China, Honor is a separate brand — these devices do not even mention parent Huawei. Honor’s target audience is young people, and it is sold exclusively online. In other countries, Honor smartphones come out with the Huawei logo, but the parent company in any case tries to make differences: in general, Huawei may be elite (like the sapphire-ceramic Ascend P7 for 50,000 rubles), but Honor is always one of the most affordable offers in its class .

Honor 6 we reviewed not long ago
, and in terms of price-to-features ratio, it really turned out to be one of the best smartphones in the mid-price range. Honor 6 Plus is a step above and no less impressive.

Let’s start with the fact that the Honor 6 Plus has a large screen, but the device itself is relatively small. The 5.5-inch matrix fits into a case measuring 150.4 x 75.7 mm and 7.5 mm thick. The device weighs 165 grams. Repeat the record of Mate 7
, in which the screen occupies 83% of the device’s area, did not work out in the case of Honor 6 Plus: here this ratio is 78.2%, which is also, in general, not bad. For iPhone 6 Plus
, for comparison, it is 71.1%, but there the frames look downright thick. On the Honor 6 Plus, the frames are, of course, visible, but they cannot be called wide.

The screen, by the way, is promised to be of very high quality: an IPS matrix with Full HD resolution, with high (it is not specified how much) brightness and a contrast ratio of 1500:1. As we know from the Mate 7, Huawei knows how to put good displays in its smartphones, so the Honor 6 Plus can also count on a very high-quality matrix. We did not have access to a colorimeter at the event in Beijing, so we will have to limit ourselves to subjective assessments. The display is really bright — at least brighter than that of Sony Xperia Z2
, — and quite contrasting: black does not look dark gray. The colors are saturated, as they like in continental Asia, the color temperature, as far as we can judge by eye, is close to the reference one.

The design of Huawei Honor 6 was developed in France — by specialists from the company’s French office. According to the next video — and at least a dozen of them were shown at the presentation — one of the designers used to work at Christian Dior, and the other worked on the appearance of cars. By the way, there are no Chinese among the designers — they are entirely European.

Honor 6 Plus is covered with glass panels on both sides. Again, without hesitation, at the presentation, a Huawei representative reminded that Apple also once made smartphones covered with glass on both sides, but now for some reason they have forgotten how cool it is. Note that the back panel of the iPhone 4 and 4s could not boast of strength — the glass often cracked or even broke. Huawei Honor 6 Plus has a composite back panel, and among other things, it has a layer of some “military material” (probably Kevlar). To demonstrate its strength, those present were shown a video where a stern Huawei employee shoots a smartphone with an air rifle: surprisingly, it does not shatter into pieces — a decent dent remains in the body, but the device supposedly continues to work. The bullet bounces off. We did not check this ourselves — for various and understandable reasons.

The back panel and side metal walls are used to dissipate heat, and a graphite heat exchanger in contact with the SoC transfers this heat to them. Of course, here on stage they again remember the iPhone 6 Plus — it also has a graphite layer, but of a smaller area. According to Huawei’s measurements, the smartphone practically does not heat up: when working on the Internet or in 3D games, it did not heat up above 40 degrees.

Honor 6 Plus, as we have already said, uses two rear cameras. Both are based on 8-megapixel sensors and equipped with exactly the same optics. The pixel size is 1.98 microns, and this is really serious. For comparison, we again present the data of the latest iPhones: they have 1.5 microns — and this is considered a fairly large pixel, that is, it captures a lot of light. Honor 6 Plus also has a front camera – also 8 megapixels.

The two rear cameras, interestingly, are not even used for taking 3D photos, but to improve the quality of the 2D picture and implement all sorts of effects like changing the focusing distance or depth of field after the fact — after taking the picture. Also, the presence of two cameras made it possible, using software processing, to somehow increase the lens aperture from ƒ/2.0 to ƒ
/0.95 — Honor 6 Plus allows you to take photos with the appropriate depth of field, that is, with a truly blurred background — for this there is a special mode in the camera menu. In general, the quality of the photos is very high: in conditions of not the best lighting in the hall of 751 Park Beijing, the smartphone takes low-noise pictures with normal colors — and this is worth a lot.

Over time, they promise to implement support for 3D shooting (however, with such low parallax, 3D should be very doubtful) and provide an SDK for users who want to develop applications
for dual camera. Both cameras are completely recessed into the body, next to them is a dual LED flash.

Honor 6 Plus uses SoC and modem made by Huawei. The role of the SoC is played by the eight-core HiSilicon Kirin 925 chip, already familiar from Ascend Mate 7, with four ARM Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores: the former operate at a frequency of 1.8 GHz, the latter at 1.3 GHz. This is the correct implementation of the big ideology. LITTLE — the processor allows you to use any number of cores and combine the load on weak and powerful cores depending on the needs of the application. To process sensor data, a separate coprocessor called i3 with a frequency of 230 MHz is used. The role of the graphics accelerator is assigned to the Mali-T628MP4.

The Kirin 925 chip is made using the 28-nm HPM process — HiSilicon has not yet reached more modern production standards, but even within the framework of the existing chips, it turns out to be quite economical. The volume of LPDDR3 RAM is 3 GB — and for this, in our opinion, the creators of a smartphone in the mid-high price category should be praised separately: usually such a volume is the prerogative of expensive devices; you will not find it in the middle segment. And modern applications have serious appetites for memory. The capacity of the built-in eMMC storage is 16 or 32 GB. Available storage space can be expanded with MicroSD cards up to 128 GB.

The modem built into the Kirin 925 is different in that it allows the Honor 6 Plus to work with two SIM cards, both of which are active and both support 4G Cat networks. 6 — that is, they can receive data at speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s. True, support for LTE and 2 SIM is only available in one version of Honor 6 Plus — the oldest, and the user will still have to choose: either a second SIM or memory expansion using MicroSD — Huawei has implemented its favorite patented MicroSIM / MicroSD connector in the smartphone. In versions with one SIM, the second slot will be allocated for MicroSD cards without options.

In addition to this, Honor 6 has a full set of wireless interfaces: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC and even IR, the tiny transmitter of which is located on the top edge. And if Bluetooth here is quite modern — 4.0, then Wi-Fi, for unknown reasons, can be said to be old — 802.11ac is not supported, only 802.11b/g/n is available
. But the module can operate not only at a frequency of 2.4 GHz, but also at 5 GHz, so there should not be any serious problems with the data transfer speed via Wi-Fi.

Let’s finish the story about the technical characteristics with information about the battery: 12.5 Wh (3300 mAh, 3.8 V). The Mate 7, with its 15.6 Wh battery and slightly larger screen, was completely impossible to drain in a day. Most likely, the Honor 6 Plus battery will be enough to work throughout the day — almost no one demands more from a modern smartphone. Finally, one more small technical feature: the MicroUSB port (which, by the way, supports OTG) in Honor 6 Plus can charge all kinds of small equipment, that is, the smartphone can be used as an external battery — given the size of its battery, this is quite important. But what we haven’t seen before is the ability to charge the battery of headphones with active noise cancellation via a 3.5 mm audio jack — this is also provided in the Honor 6 Plus.

Now we’ll tell you about a couple of Chinese miracles that, unfortunately, will not appear in Russia. Miracle one: Honor Pay is a payment system using NFC. Currently, you can pay by tapping your phone on the terminal for rides on the Chinese subway and snacks at a Chinese Starbucks. In our country there are analogues of Honor Pay, but in order to get all the delights of paying for coffee using your phone, you need to make friends with MTS Bank or turn to third-party applications that create a virtual card — in general, you will have to suffer a little. It will not be possible to pay for the Moscow metro in any case, although the capital’s government was going to introduce this option in test mode starting in December.

The second miracle: the SkyTone soft SIM card embedded in the Kirin 925. With its help, Huawei offers its compatriots to use data transfer while roaming at non-roaming rates. Prices promise to be more than affordable: 5 yuan (about 50 rubles at the time of writing this article) for 20 MB of traffic or 28 yuan per day of unlimited Internet access. True, SkyTone is offered only to owners of the most expensive version with two SIM cards 4G
. Also available to Honor users are 8 million hotspots Wi-Fi free of charge
in airports and hotels around the world.

Honor 6 Plus runs Android 4.4, dressed in the EMUI 3.0 shell, already familiar to users of modern Huawei devices. Let us remind you that this version of Emotion UI, among other things, accepts gestures when the screen is turned off, and in terms of interface design it is in some places reminiscent of the latest versions of iOS. And here, for some reason, comparisons with iPhones are not heard from the stage.

The cost of the older version of Honor 6 Plus — with two SIM cards and a 32 GB drive — in China will be 2,499 yuan (approximately 25,000 rubles at the time of writing this article). A simpler version — with one SIM card and 16 GB of memory — will cost 1,999 yuan (about 20,000 rubles). Note that smartphones in China are quite expensive. Let’s say, in a market like our “Gorbushka” they ask for 4,499 yuan for the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. So the announced prices place the Honor 6 Plus in the middle class — and for a middle-class device it really turned out to be extremely promising. Only one question remains: will Honor 6 Plus be available in Russia
— and at what prices.