The Huawei Honor 6 Plus looks a lot like a slightly larger version of the Huawei Honor 6, hence the ‘plus’ name (well it was either going to be ‘plus’ or ‘pro’). The actual body shape of the phone is very basic, with clean lines and no bulk. Front and rear are covered in glass with smooth transitions rom the body to screen, and slight protective lip around the rear camera. The top, left and right sides of the Huawei Honor 6 Plus get a metal edge which offer a nice comfy feel, while the base is a much more rounded all plastic allowing the phone to sit very comfortably in your hand while making calls and general use.
Huawei have done a good job creating a clean and simple design, no fuss or silly features, and all the components are right where they you would expect them to be. USB in the base, headphone jack in the top with IR blaster, and power and volume controls on the right. The right and side is also where dual trays live for either dual SIM usage or a single SIM and SD card. Some neat touches include the knurled alloy design on the power and volume controls which add some nice grip them. On our test model both physical button can be wobbled from side to side, but they are not loose to the point of rattling in the frame. With glass front and rear the body is very smooth in your hand, but hardly slippy. I do like the smooth feeling on the screen which makes gaming smooth and fluid, it also appears to be coated in a oleophobic coating as finger prints and smears don’t tend to be as visible as say the Meizu MX4 Pro, and clean off much easier. The front screen is hard wearing gorilla Glass 3 and so far I have not managed to scratch it, however I have picked up plenty of small scratches on the rear. Luckily these are not easily visible on this white version of the phone. The glass and plastic body is light and comfortable, however I am not 100% sold on the feeling of quality. It feels ‘OK’ but compared to the Xiaomi Mi Note (also glass and plastic with metal sides) it feels a little cheap. A thick body means a 3600mAh battery nestles inside the phone with promise of extra long battery life, but the phone itself is quite compact with narrow bezels and minimal body top and bottom. There are no capacitive controls on the Huawei Honor 6 Plus, only on-screen instead which doesn’t really both me too much normally but I feel Huawei could have made these controls a little more functional.Hardware and Performance
With a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 FHD display up front there is really nothing to complain about. With brightness turned up you can see well on bright sunny days, and touch response is very good, also aided by the super smooth display. Some work is needed to improve the brightness control which seems to do little to adjust brightness. Automatic seems to just keep the screen on full and manual controls are a little delicate with a large jump in brightness especially notable when using at night. Colours and text are reproduced very well, and overall the screen is a joy to use, even better once Huawei sort the brightness control in future ROM updates. The single external speaker offers loud, crisp and clear audio. Huawei have also cleverly designed the the speaker so it shouldn’t be covered with your hand while holding in landscape. There is plenty of volume to fill a small room with sound, just don’t expect much in the way of bass. Audio quality through a good set of earphones is very good. The Huawei Honor 6 Plus features DTS sound and there is a notable change in richness and bass once this is enabled. Call quality is very good too, the receiver being one of the clearest I have used in a long while. Huawei develop their own Hisilcon processors for many of their mid-range and flagship phones. The Huawei Honor 6 Plus uses an octacore Kirin 925 processor with 3GB RAM, and a Mali-T628 MP4 GPU. In benchmarks Kirin processors aren’t setting any records, but as we all know by now real world testing is really needed. Unfortunately performance isn’t all that stunning in real life either. The phone never feels snappy, and when browsing complicated websites the Honor 6 Plus simple stops and just cannot cope with the rendering. This get’s extremely tiresome, and isn’t acceptable. To be fair to the Kirin processor I feel that the issue could be down to ROM optimizations, and as Huawei are rolling out updates on a regular basis feel confident we will see some improvement. The Kirin chipset also seems to be working pretty hard to run games and benchmarks judging by the amount of heat that the phone gives off when really pushed hard.
Camera
Huawei have given the 6 Plus a single front facing 8 mega-pixel camera, stunning for video calls,and dual 8 mega-pixel cameras on the rear. A dual rear camera set up isn’t new for phone design, but this was the first time I have every tested a dual camera phone for any length of time and I was eager to see if having the extra sensor made a difference. First of all what does the additional rear sensor bring to the function of the phone? Well as far as I can tell during my testing (and it has been very through), the dual camera set up is primarily used to add depth when using the ‘wide-aperture’ mode, and to collect more light when using the “super night mode”, both very cool features which can produce amazing photos. Super Night mode sucks up so much light that I am able to take photos of stars that I didn’t even know were there! Photos taken in the normal mode, i.e with a single 8 mega-pixel camera are very good and don’t get too noisy in low light conditions. The camera itself is very fast to capture images, but the shutter animation, and sound aren’t really sorted and gives the illusion of slow response. Huawei have created a phone that can take some really stunning photos, but if you want to get the most out of the Super Night Mode then you are going to have to invest in a small tripod, a worthy investment in my opinion.
Software
Huawei has their own skinned version of Android the East, which is currently bed in android 4.4.4 EMUI features a lot of nice components, but there is plenty of room for improvement. A camera centric phone like the Huawei Honor 6 Plus needs more camera features. Vivo and Oppo both realised this with their phones, and I hope Huawei can create new functions for the dual camera set up.Optimizations for battery life and performance are the major hurdle for the Huawei Honor 6 Plus. As mentioned above the phone struggles while web browsing, and battery life should be more reliable for a large battery device such as this.one minor niggle are the EMUI icons for some applications are just plain ugly. Not a big issue and one that can easily be solved with an icon pack or launcher. Thankfully EMUI is getting regular updates, if you are running the Chinese version of the ROM (which only has English and Chinese), so these issue will hopefully be solved in future versions.
Conclusion
Honor 6 Plus still needs to be optimised to make the most of it’s octacore chipst, 3GB RAM and huge 3600mAh battery, but once the ROM is sorted Huawei will have a killer phone on their hands. The prices are $486 for this 3GB RAM, 32GB memory version of the Huawei Honor 6 Plus.
