After launching its Ascend P7, Huawei has turned its attention to the Honor series where they have just launched its newest Honor 6 smart phone in China. While the Honor series is normally seen as a mid-spec offering, Huawei didn’t hold back on this one as they have thrown in the best they could offer in a smart phone.
The Honor 6 is running on their in house Hi-Silicon Octa-Core Kirin 920 processor and is mated to 3GB of RAM. The Kirin 920 uses the big.LITTLE architecture which consists of 2 sets of Quad-Core processors with 4 Cortex A15 cores and another 4 with Cortex A7. As part of their ambition to roll out more 4G LTE enabled devices, the Kirin 920 supports Cat 6 4G LTE which enables faster speeds up to 300Mbps. During the launch, Huawei claims that the Kirin 920 performance is superior than the current top of the line Snapdragon 805 chipset.
The display is a 5″ Full HD unit from JDI and it boast an ultra thin bezel of just 2.86mm. Design wise, the Honor 6 is quite similar as the Ascend P7 with its metallic frame and glass panels on both sides with fine patterns at the back. Probably the only differentiator is at the bottom, where it doesn’t get the rounded off like the Ascend P7. Overall, the device is remarkably thin at 7.5mm which is a milimetre more than the Ascend P7. With a large 3,100mAh battery on board, it still weighs a respectable 135 grams.
For imaging, the Honor 6 gets a 13MP Sony IMX214 camera at the back which is the same unit found on the OnePlus One and Oppo Find 7. At the front, it gets a 5MP camera with a wide 88 degree angle lens.
Out of the box, it runs on Huawei’s latest Emotion UI 2.3 that’s running on top of Android 4.4.2 KitKat. It will be priced at 1,999 Yuan (about RM1,032) for 16GB and 2,299 Yuan (about RM1,187) for 32GB. At the moment, it is going on sale in China starting 1st July and there’s no mention when will this be available globally.
With the Honor 6 having better processor, faster 4G LTE speeds and a larger battery, it appears that its latest Ascend P7 has just gotten overshadowed. Looking at the pace of Chinese brands, we could be looking at 2 or 3 flagship models from Huawei this year just to keep up with the competition.