Honor 6X hands-on

Honor pulled the wraps off the Honor 6X back in October for the Chinese market. Fast forward a few months, the company has announced the Honor 6X for the US and European markets. The phone will replace the widely successful Honor 5X, which was also announced at CES, though, last year.

The Honor 5X’s tagline was “No Nonsense”. There was finally a smartphone that offered the flagship-worthy features that the average consumer wants, but without the need to pay for a flagship premium. The Honor 6X is a refined version of the Honor 5X with a larger battery, more powerful CPU, and a dual-camera setup to compliment Honor and Huawei’s other flagship offerings like the Huawei P9 and Mate 9 or the Honor 8.

The dual-camera setup isn’t quite the same as the one found on the Honor 8. The latter has dual 12MP cameras, though one is monochrome and the other is RGB while the Honor 6X has one 12MP sensor “for composition” while the other is a 2MP “depth sensor”. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of photos the Honor 6X will be able to produce compared to the Honor 8.

If you’ve encountered the Honor 5X beforehand, the first thing you’ll notice is the refinement of hardware for a device that’s built on a tight budget. Soft lines envelop the device and give the Honor 6X a more inviting design, not to mention the curves that wrap around the edges give the phone a really nice feeling in-hand.

The 5.5-inch display is definitely an improvement over last year’s Honor 5X in terms of image quality and color accuracy. So besides that and the “Honor” logo’s apt placement on the bottom bezel, the front of the phone remains mostly unchanged. From the Honor 5X.

The curved edges on the backside somewhat remind me of the iPhone 6/6S/7’s. While iPhone doesn’t have one, the Honor 6X has a seam between the back plate and the screen’s plastic frame. This is adjacent to a paper-thin chamfer on the back plate that goes all the way around the phone.

On the backside, a matte finish, replaces the brushed aluminum finish of the Honor 5X. We prefer the matte-metal finish as it’s less prone to fingerprint smudging. At the top of the backside, we find the 6X’s dual camera, and under it a round, rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, and next to the camera is a single LED flash.

The left side has no buttons, but a single card tray. This tray houses two nanoSIM cards or one nanoSIM with one microSD card. So while the Honor 5X was a true dualSIM device, the Honor 6X replaced the dual trays with a single, hybrid tray. A bummer for those who want to use two SIM cards AND a microSD card.

At the top, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack and a noise-cancelling mic. At the bottom is a dual-grilled speaker/mic combo with a microUSB port. The left grille is the in-call mic and the right grille is a loudspeaker. Also on the bottom is a microUSB port; given that it’s a budget device, the decision to not go with USB-C is justified. Speaking of which, the battery is a larger 3,340 mAh pack which should yield an excellent battery score in our tests. Even with a larger battery, the Honor 6X measures in with the same thickness of its predecessor at 8.2mm.

A HiSilicon Kirin 655 is at the heart of the Honor 6X; an improvement over the 5X’s Snapdragon 616. It’s great to see Huawei/Honor found success with using its own in-house chips in its flagship phones. We can’t wait to push the CPU’s limits for our full review. Paired with the Kirin 655 are 3GB of RAM (at least on the US variant).

The Honor 6X will be available in the US and Europe for 250USD/EUR (and 225GBP) with pre-orders starting today and orders will begin shipping to customers on January 10. Honor will also have flash sales where the 6X will be sold in limited quantities for 199 USD/EUR. For more information about availability and pricing, check out our announcement post and be sure to look out for our full review of the Honor 6X.

Here are some more photos of a gray unit.

Gray Honor 6X