Honor 6x Specification / Review / Scores

TheHonor 6X comes one year after its predecessor, the Honor 5X, which was a solid, dependable smartphone that delivered decent all-round performance. Honor has produced some notable smartphones in the past year, of which, the Honor 8 is one example.

The Honor 6X is yet another metal-clad smartphone vying for attention in a very crowded segment. It boasts of dual rear cameras and is powered by Huawei’s custom silicon under the hood. It will compete against heavyweights like the Moto G4 Plus and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 , both of which have proven to be solid performers. Let’s see if Honor’s new offering manages to deliver as good an experience, if not better.

Honor 6X design and build

We’ve been using the Honor 6X for the better part of a month now and so far, our impressions of the build and finish have stayed pretty much consistent with when we first got our hands on it. The metal chassis has a satin-like finish which feels really good when you hold it. On the flip side, it does make it tricky to grip this phone, and it can easily slide out of your hand. The gentle curves around the sides don't help much with grip either, although aesthetically, this phone looks very good.

The 5.5-inch display on the Honor 6X has fairly thin borders on either side, which makes at least basic one-handed use possible. You can shrink the display and the preinstalled Huawei Swype keyboard to either side to of the screen for more comfortable one-handed use if needed. We found the brightness levels to be adequate for outdoor use, with good viewing angles and colour reproduction. The full-HD resolution also ensures that there are no visible jaggies around text and icons which makes the display good for reading and watching video. The glass on the display is scratch resistant too. The Honor 6X has a bit of a chin below the screen which helps when you need to hold it landscape mode for gaming or videos.

On the left side, the Honor 6X has a slot for two SIM cards, which can also accommodate a microSD card (up to 128GB) in the second slot. This setup is step back from the 5X, which had a dedicated slot for the microSD card. The volume rocker and power buttons are placed on the right, and have good tactile feedback. There’s a mono speaker grille and microphone at the bottom, flanking the Micro-USB port. The Honor 6X misses out on a Type-C port, which is quickly becoming the defacto standard for Android smartphones.

Around the back, the Honor 6X has the dual-camera setup, LED flash, and fingerprint sensor. Just like the fingerprint sensor on earlier Honor phones, it’s very quick at authentication and we didn’t really have to deal with any misreads during our usage. Overall, the Honor 6X scores well in the design and build quality departments. Its body doesn’t offer the best grip, but barring that, it’s well-crafted and looks good. We were sent just a naked phone for this review but you should expect the usual set of accessories in the retail box.

Honor 6X specifications

The Honor 6X sports an SoC developed by Huawei in-house, called the Kirin 655. This mid-range octa-core chip packs in four Cortex-A53 CPU cores running at 2.1GHz and four companion Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.7GHz. In terms of graphics, we have a Mali-T830 GPU. The Kirin 655 is roughly 20-25 percent slower than Qualcomm’s equivalent Snapdragon 625.

While it’s not exactly a powerhouse of an SoC, it does pack a good enough punch to handle most games and apps. The Honor 6X got an AnTuTu score of 57,530; PCMark score of 4,406; and 3DMark Unlimited score of 7,810.