Announced earlier this week, Huawei's latest flagship Android phone, the Honor 6, comes with souped-up specs that give it a chance against its competitors. And while Huawei's more well-known for its telecom side of things, the company has been putting in quite a bit of effort to become a player in the smartphone market.
But is the phone enough to give the Chinese electronics manufacturer a stepping stone into a very competitive market? Perhaps.
Instead of sticking with the tried and true Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, Huawei has for quite a while now, been using its own home-grown processors for its higher-end devices. The Honor 6 is no exception and comes with a Kirin 920 octa-core processor that uses the big.LITTLE configuration.
This means that it has four faster A15 cores and four less powerful A7 cores that work together and depending on what's required of the phone, the more powerful A15 cores can offload the work to the A7 cores to save on power.
Huawei says the chip's performance is comparable to the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, which certainly sounds impressive on paper. Given that the performance of the
Huawei Ascend P7's Kirin 910T processor didn't do as well against the equivalent Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip, I have my doubts.
However, there's one benefit to using the new Kirin 920 chip -- the Honor 6 will be capable of connecting to Category 6 LTE, which is capable of download speeds of up to 300Mbps. However, there aren't many networks that currently support this standard -- in South Korea, where they are rolling out LTE-Advanced networks for consumers,
speeds only go up to 225Mbps at the moment (though there are plans to exceed 300Mbps by the end of the year).
Designwise, the Honor 6 seems to have gone for an aluminum finish, and is just 6.8mm thick. Huawei has been pushing its super-slim phones for a while now, and the Honor 6 is no exception.
Also, instead of using a high-resolution QHD (2,560x1,440-pixel) display, the Honor 6 comes with a 5-inch full-HD (1,920x1,080 pixels) screen. This should help with battery life, which should easily last a day thanks to the 3,100mAh battery.
Other specs include 3GB of RAM, 16GB or 32GB of internal storage, and a 13-megapixel rear camera that uses a Sony sensor. It runs
Android 4.4 (KitKat) and likely has Huawei's EmotionUI skin on top.
Pricewise, the 16GB Honor 6 will likely retail for 1,999 Chinese yuan ($320, £187, AU$339) while the 32GB version will cost 2,999 Chinese yuan ($400, £234, AU$423).
