Your pal in the new digital world

A POWERFUL smartphone with a good quality camera and fast 4G connection, the Huawei Honor 6+ boasts excellent hardware specs as well as a large battery that comfortably survives a day of intensive online function usage.

The phone has a sleek and thin body and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the front. The frame is made of six-layer strong fibreglass with a metal edge. 

The Honor 6+ has a large 5.5-inch TFT-LTPS display with 1920 x 1080 pixels or 403-ppi pixel depth and is powered by Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 925 Octa-core. Four of the cores run at 1.8 GHz and the other four at 1.3 GHz.

The smartphone has 3 gigabytes of RAM or working memory thus ensuring that multitasking will not slow down the phone or cause its operations to freeze. It has plenty of internal storage too with 32 GB that’s expandable with a microSD card up to 128 GB.

However, do bear in mind that the microSD card slot doubles as the second SIM slot so if you use the Honor 6+ as a dual SIM phone, you will have no slot for expanding the storage. One SIM slot is for a nano SIM and the second one for a micro SIM.

The first SIM slot supports 4G LTE connection and both SIM slots support 3G of HSPA+ connection.

I tested the Honor 6+ on TrueMove H’s 4G network and I was impressed by the connection speed.

I tested the download and upload speed of the 4G network in front of Soi Pattanakarn 65 and they were the fastest of all the smartphones I have tested so far. Benchmarked by Ookla speedtest app, I got a blazing download speed of 61.55 megabits per second and a very fast upload speed of 20.23 Mb/s.

During the test on TrueMove H’s 4G network, Honor 6+ plus uploaded snapshots to my OneDrive cloud space in no time. Posting snapshots on my Facebook wall was a breeze and both email and Facebook checking were very fast.

The Honor 6+ was also impressive in its performance. Its touch screen and menus were very responsive, scrolling was fast and video clips and games ran smoothly.

The 5.5-inch screen was pleasingly bright and I enjoyed watching video clips and viewing photo.

The Honor 6+ has a good-quality dual 8-megapixel main camera and its front camera, also with 8-megapixel resolution, is good for taking selfies. 

The main camera boasts good low-light performance thanks to its Eagle-Eye technology that uses two lenses to capture light.

The design allows the camera to achieve a very fast focus time of 0.1 seconds and low-light performance to increase by up to 60 per cent.

During the test, I found that Honor 6+ captured sharp and clean shots even indoors with the lights dimmed.

It captured beautiful pictures at night too as well as great silhouette and sunset shots. There’s even a special night mode that requires you to secure a camera on a stand and leave the shutter open for several seconds to allow the light to pass in.

The wide aperture mode is a lot of fun. It allows you to drag the aperture icon and to select between f/0.95 to f/16 of the aperture value. At f/0.95 the background will be blurred like a shot taken by a DSLR though it is worth remembering that the aperture value is achieved by software, not the hardware feature of the lens. That means you can even change the aperture value while viewing and editing the photo on the phone.

Using the wide aperture mode, I could easily capture a subject with blurred background.

The Honor 6+ also sounds good with DTS technology so you can enjoy music with it.

The phone has an infrared port with a universal app, allowing you to use it control TVs, air-conditioners and other electric appliances.

Huawei Honor 6+ is available in three colours – white, black and gold – and retails for Bt15,990.

 

Key Specs

 

- OS: Android 4.4

- Network: 4G LTE FDD/LTE TD, 3G CDMA/UMTS/TDS-CDMA and GSM of all frequencies

- Processor: Kirin 925 octa-core processor 1.8 GHz and 1.3 GHz

- GPU: Mali T628

- Memory: 3GB RAM

- Storage: 32 GB with microSD slot for up to 128GB card

- Cameras: 8 megapixel main, |8 megapixel front

- Display: 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel TFT-LTPS panel

- SIM slots: micro SIM, nano SIM

- Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Low Energy, NFC, |Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, micro USB 2.0, 3.5mm stereo jack

- Sensors: Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor, Compass and Gyroscope. 

- Dimensions: 150.5 x 75.5 x 7.5mm

- Weight: 165 grams