Huawei Honor 6 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu & Joshua Ho on September 12, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Android
- Mobile
- Honor 6
Display brightness and accuracy
The 5" 1080p display is manufacutred by JDI. The display is a non-IPS display and the viewing angles are visibly suffering from this, however it's not terrible. It offers excellent brightness and is very visible in bright conditions other than direct sunlight reflections.
The black levels on the display can be quite disappointing, the light bleed of the display at night-time or on dark content is visible. Here the JDI panel fails to impress and can't compete with competing IPS panels from LG, not to mention AMOLED screens.
The default colour temperature that the Honor 6 comes configured with falls into the more blue-ish white that we also see from many other LCD manufacturers. The difference is that Huawei offers a colour temperature control in the display settings that allow you to tune this.
Sadly, the slider has no scale and thus it's not possible to determine the white point that you're setting without having calibration equipment, however it's more than enough to customize it to your own preference, and if you have trained eyes, even hit 6500K with it.
In terms of grayscale accuracy, the Honor 6 falls in the middle ground, neither impressing nor disappointing too much. We see a very low total gamma figure of 1.965, being dragged down by bad calibration in the high brightness levels. The RGB balance is also very off with too much blue while in the display's default colour temperature.
In the sRGB colourspace gamut measurement the Honor 6 seems to perform excellently if you just look at the 100% saturation points. Even the saturation accuracy performance is top-notch, rivalling all but the iPhone 5C's calibration.
If you look at the CIE 1976 saturations chart, you will see that there's some saturation compression going on, mostly notable in the green and red spectrum.
Unfortunately, it's on the GMB accuracy test on which the Honor 6 fails to impress. Due to the default colour temperature's settings, the whole blue spectrum is oversaturated and misses the target colours, greatly bringing down the overall DeltaE for this test.
All in all, the Honor 6 offers a good display. Its weakness lies in the viewing angles which remind me of Sony's original Xperia Z, and the not so good black levels. With the included temperature controls in the OS, you are able to fix the blueish display if you wish so, but Huawei could have definitely included display profiles for this functionality that would have offered true 6500K whites.
720p "Rog" mode
Huawei offers a mysterious "Rog technology" switch in the main settings, without much explanation on what it does or how it works. While playing around with it I found that it's nothing else than a switch to run the phone in 720p. It resets Android's window-manager to 720x1280 and requires a reboot each time you switch it on or off. The DPI of the OS and all graphics are also reduced to maintain the same aspect-ratio of the UI elements. This is the first time I've seen an OEM make use of this and presents itself as an interesting option for people who feel that 1080p is a waste on current smartphones.
I tried to capture the effect with a macro shot of small text, arguably the most noticeable instance where this would be visible. For comparison, the above is a full-screen screenshot of what I was trying to magnify.
The results are quite intriguing, the 720p offered little added jagginess as the hardware was able to do quite good quality upsampling to the screen's native 1080p. In general what you would notice is more of a blurriness and reduction in sharpness. I could definitely see people with not so perfect eyesight using this mode at all times as it reduces the load on the GPU and improves performance and battery life.
Ideally, it would be interesting to see a 720p mode on 1440p screens as it would offer perfect scaling, with one logical pixel being mapped to exactly four physical ones, without the need for interpolation and upscaling artifacts.
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TekDemon - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
I wonder if the "Rog" mode is a reference to ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG) hardware line-i.e. a gaming mode. Given the weak GPU maybe the mode is there for people who want to play 3D games to be able to run everything at 720P and thus get acceptable framerates instead of everything having to be rendered at 1080P. It's actually a pretty great idea, especially with the newer 1440P screens on high end phones even the beefiest GPUs will struggle for framerates in graphics intense games.p51d007 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
I don't care for a user replaceable battery in my Ascend Mate2...it's 400mAH and lasts days at a time, plus, I'm tech savvy enough (40 years in electronics) that I can get one and replace it myself.Huawei is starting to make some noise in the market, which "should" benefit consumers by causing the competition to either step up to the plate, or get left behind.
Right now, I'm a big fan of Huawei, even though the Mate2 isn't "flagship" in the spec department, it runs perfectly, fast, bright screen and the 2-3 day battery life? LOVE IT!
cnanews - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
I experienced a few surveys and purchaser remarks in a Chinese shopping sites where individuals have complained about wifi gathering issueshttp://cnanews.in/huawei-honor-6-with-octa-core-so...
ritwik - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Isn't it an amazing device? It's just awesome, 3GB RAM with 1.7Ghz Octa core processor it's just superfast http://goo.gl/4wojuWsiteOwner - Saturday, October 18, 2014 - link
Hi,Do you know if scheduler and governor used in Huawei Honor 6 are custom made by Huawei or are default from Linux Kernel? So if I install other rom will I get those core/task/scheduler/governor settings??
Best Regards
equanim1ty - Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - link
Yes.. There is definitely some issue with the Bus Bandwidth config for Honor 6 .Honor 6 has real problem with using Bluetooth and Internet simultaneously. Whenever I connected my Bluetooth (Stereo Headset), the internet bandwidth drops drastically
Use case: If I'm on Viber through (Wifi @ 16Mbps or H+) , the bandwidth drops and it works fine without the Bluetooth. In order to confirm this I did multiple speed test while streaming offline Music ( Note: Music on SD card) - The internet connection speed dropped drastically from 16Mbps to the range of 1- 1.2 Mbps. I paused the music and it again jumped back to 14- 16Mbps. This happens even if I'm on 3G. I'm suspecting this is some type of implementation issue either with the architecture / bus configuration? Just wish this gets resolved with future ROM updates for an otherwise great device
equanim1ty - Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - link
Yes.. There is definitely some issue with the Bus Bandwidth config for Honor 6 .Honor 6 has real problem with using Bluetooth and Internet simultaneously. Whenever I connected my Bluetooth (Stereo Headset), the internet bandwidth drops drastically
Use case: If I'm on Viber through (Wifi @ 16Mbps or H+) , the bandwidth drops and it works fine without the Bluetooth. In order to confirm this I did multiple speed test while streaming offline Music ( Note: Music on SD card) - The internet connection speed dropped drastically from 16Mbps to the range of 1- 1.2 Mbps. I paused the music and it again jumped back to 14- 16Mbps. This happens even if I'm on 3G. I'm suspecting this is some type of implementation issue either with the architecture / bus configuration? Just wish this gets resolved with future ROM updates for an otherwise great device
spixel - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link
"The 5" 1080p display is manufacutred by JDI. The display is a non-IPS display and the viewing angles are visibly suffering from this, however it's not terrible"Seriously??? Of course the display is IPS, what on earth are you talking about? IPS is the standard display type for all modern smartphones except extremely cheap budget phones or those with Amoled.
Bala63 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Well, I have been using Honor 6 for almost a year and I would say this is the best budget phone that I ever had! Kirin outperforms Snapdragon in most segments and the phone performs like a butter! I'm a hardcore gamer and I enjoyed playing MC4, Mortal Kombat X, Immortals and what not and I never witnessed any lag at any point of time. Camera is decent and yes, u can't expect a DSLR for 20k. But trust me, for this price, there's no better camera in the market. Battery backup is excellent! I use 4G and I get 30% charge left after using it for 5 hours continuous. Wi-Fi is a real boon! The connectivity is continuous and it is through Wi-Fi that I download movies from yify! Believe me, I wasn't disappointed with the speed and downloading of torrents, not even once. And yes, Huawei did an excellent job providing a Lollipop update for Honor 6. Now I'm able to record games in 720p and upload it to YouTube! Come on guys, Huawei is new to smart phones and we can't expect miracles in their initial attempts. EMUI offers a smooth interface with a lot of cool new themes from Huawei market. And I forgot to tell you, this is a mini-HDD! With all apps installed, I still have around 8 GB of internal storage and a mammoth 64 GB external, memory card option. The phone offers an inbuilt phone manager that scans apps, informs you about junk files, apps that take space and stuff like that! So no need for an external anti virus app. Video calling works so well and flawless in 4G.In addition, Huawei offers special features like backup, touch functions for calls, gestures for apps and what not! Honor 6 is nothing short of a marvel and I'm proud to say this is the best budget phone that I've ever had!