Honor 6 Plus review

Display

We had no complaints about the 5.5in, 1,920×1,080 display either. With an sRGB colour gamut score of 98.4%, the Honor 6 Plus is able to produce richer, more accurate colours than several top end smartphones, including the HTC One M9 and LG G4.

A peak brightness of 483.00cd/m2 also adds a pleasing level of punch to onscreen images without affecting black levels too much, which measured 0.31cd/m2. The 1,527:1 contrast ratio provided plenty of detail, too, and we were able to see the screen clearly no matter how oblique the angle.

Performance

Inside, an octa-core Kirin 925 processor utilises ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture to automatically switch between its faster quad-core 1.8GHz Cortex A15 chip and its slower quad-core 1.3GHz Cortex A7 chip to help reduce power consumption. If necessary, all eight cores can be called upon simultaneously, so it has plenty of speed for everyday tasks.

For instance, its score of 3,251 in Geekbench 3 puts it comfortably in the same ball park as the HTC One M9 and Huawei Ascend P8, and miles in front of the iPhone 6. Futuremark’s Peacekeeper browser test also returned a highly impressive score of 1,164. So far, the only phones we’ve tested that have beaten this figure are the LG G Flex 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, and day-to-day web browsing was supremely smooth. Complex web pages posed no problem at all, and scrolling, pinch-zooming and panning round pages were all extremely responsive.  

The only area where the Honor 6 Plus fell down was graphics performance. With a score of just 461 frames in GFX Bench’s offscreen Manhattan test, the Honor 6 Plus has almost half the power of many of its flagship rivals, including the HTC One M9 and LG G4. In practice, though, we were able to play demanding games such as Blizzard’s Hearthstone with very little judder at all, so it should still be able to handle most titles in the Google Play Store, although perhaps not at quite the highest quality settings as you’ll find on other flagship smartphones.

The Honor 6 Plus comes with 32GB of onboard storage, but its microSD card slot (which doubles up as secondary SIM card slot) can take cards up to 128GB, so you should have plenty of room for all your files.

Battery life

Fortunately, its excellent screen and decent performance doesn’t come at the expense of battery life. With a huge 3,600mAh battery on board, Honor claims two days of moderate use or over 23 days on standby. It lasted through the weekend when we were using it day to day, but heavy users should still be able to get a full day’s use out of it. In our continuous video playback test it managed 10h 28m with the screen set to half brightness, which isn’t far off what we’ve seen from the LG G4.

Design

The only slight worry we have about the Honor 6 Plus is its flat fibreglass rear panel, which we felt was quite slippery when holding the phone in one hand. Admittedly, this is a problem we’ve had with the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Sony’s Xperia Z phones as well, but the Honor 6 Plus seems to be far more prone to getting irreparably scratched than other glass-backed handsets we’ve tested. This is a shame, as its angular edges and semi-metallic frame made the rest of the handset feel very solid and tough.

Conclusion

However, the biggest flaw is that the phone is stuck with both Android 4.4.2 and Huawei’s divisive Emotion UI, which makes it feel very old-fashioned. The notification and shortcuts menu are still separated into two panels (which annoyingly always opens the shortcut tab first regardless of which side of the screen your swipe), and the absence of an app tray can make your home screen feel extremely cluttered.

As a result, Huawei’s custom launcher really lets the Honor 6 Plus down. Without it the phone would pose a significant threat to almost every other major smartphone we’ve tested this year. At £300 on Three’s Pay as You Go or £24-per-month with an upfront cost of £19 on contract, it’s much cheaper than other top-end handsets, and its excellent screen, great battery life and flexible camera all work together to make it a good value handset. We just wish both Huawei and Honor would stop trying to ape the iPhone and deliver a more modern Android launcher to match the calibre of its handsets.