Honor 6X review: A dual-camera Moto G4 Plus adversary

Honor 6X review: Performance

Despite the price, the Honor 6X is no slouch in everyday use. There’s a 2.1GHz Kirin 655 octa-core processor inside, joining forces with 4GB of RAM. With a GeekBench single core score of 784 and 3,319 for multi-core, the 6X is more or less a carbon-copy of Huawei’s latest P9 Lite.

What this boils down to is a smooth and responsive experience in general, and surprisingly stable multitasking. Honor says its smart file system (HTC’s 10 Evo has a similar facility) reduces file fragmentation for faster response times and it certainly feels that way.

It’s a great performer once you crack open some Android games, too. It scored an average frame rate of 8.4fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3 test, which is perfectly respectable for a budget phone, and the likes of Threes! and Angry Birds 2 ran without a hitch.

Battery life is less impressive but it’s big at 3,340mAh in size and it didn’t do too badly in our test, lasting 11hrs 18mins while playing back video continuously in flight mode. For context, that’s roughly an hour longer than 2016’s 5X, although it lags behind the current king of budget smartphones – the Moto G4 Plus – which lasted more than two hours longer.

Honor 6X review: EMUI

It wouldn’t be an Android phone without a bit of overlay tinkering and the Honor 6X is no exception. Usually, this is the point at which we castigate Honor for insisting on preloading its own onerous launcher software, but Honor’s EMUI is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

And while there’s still quite a bit of superfluous pre-installed software – a handful of naff games and unnecessary apps – you can at least get rid of them. The downside is that the Honor 6X doesn’t ship with Android 7 Nougat, but Honor is promising an OTA update in the coming months. Watch this space.

Honor 6X review: Verdict

This price bracket is chock full of budget smartphones well worth considering, but the Honor 6X stands above most of them. Its design, camera quality and performance are great for the money, and battery life isn’t bad either.

The Moto G4 and G4 Plus deliver more bang for your buck and have better battery life and a more-pleasant-to-use camera. But I’ll freely admit I’m shallow when it comes to smartphones, and prefer the Honor for its fancier design and that dual-lens camera.

But what’s really impressive about the Honor 6X is that it holds firm against smartphones that cost twice (and in some cases three) times as much as its £225 asking price. In short, Honor has created a fantastically capable budget smartphone in the 6X at a very tempting price, and it’s impossible not to recommend it.