Huawei Honor 6 Plus first impressions: Smartphone features an innovative camera system; priced at Rs 26,499

Huawei announced the Honor 6 Plus  along with the budget Honor 4X, at an event in New Delhi today. This will be its high end smartphone in the Honor segment, till it launches its upcoming Ascend P8 at the London event next month. The Honor 6 Plus is an upgrade to the Huawei Honor 6 which came out last June. The Honor 6 Plus will start selling on Flipkart from today onwards at Rs 26,499. Although the Honor 6 Plus was launched in China in December last year, it is only today that the phone will start selling here. We had a chance to play around with the Huawei Honor 6 Plus and here are our first impressions of the device. Design and Build Quality  One of the striking features of the Huawei Honor 6 was its light weight. The story repeats with the Honor 6 Plus. It is just 165 grams thin and has 7.5mm thickness. The Honor 6 Plus is a 5.5-inch device and it felt like the front-face had too much bezel on the top and bottom edge. Even the bezel on the sides wasn’t as thin as we have seen with flagship devices. It has flat topped edges and it uses rounded corners around the phone.

The rear side of the phone is made up of 6-layer carbon fiber material, which Huawei claims is even bullet-proof. The volume rocker and power/standby buttons are on the right hand side below which you have the dual SIM card slot. On top there is the headphone jack along with an IR blaster. Overall, the build quality seemed good despite the lightness of the device. Even though it had a glossy back, the phones edges and rear side gave a good grip. Processor, RAM, Storage  The Huawei Honor 6 Plus houses the HiSilicon Kirin 925 SoC which has an octa-core processor in the big.LITTLE configuration. There is a quad-core Cortex A7 and a quad-core Cortex A15 processors which is paired with 3GB of RAM. Naturally, these high end specs ensured that the phone did not lag while swiping through the menus, scrolling web-pages and so on. But we will need to run it through all our tests to give a final call on that. The phone will come with 32GB of internal storage which can be expanded using the microSD card slot. OS, Battery On first glance at the phone and the shape of the soft buttons for home, back and menu, one would mistake this phone to be sporting the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS. But that is not the case. It comes with Android 4.4.2 out of the box which is upgradeable to Android 4.4.4 KitKat. Huawei has put on the Emotion UI 3.0 skin atop the Android OS. Just like Gionee’s Amigo and Oppo’s proprietary UI, Emotion UI too lets go of the app drawer. When it came to the battery, the Huawei representatives were comparing the Honor 6 Plus with the iPhone 6 Plus, thanks to the 3,900 mAh battery that powers the Honor 6 Plus. Camera  The camera of the Honor 6 Plus is what will set it apart from competition, simply because it has not one, but two of them. There are two 8MP rear cameras placed side-by-side along with a dual LED flash unit. According the Huawei representatives, the dual-camera setup helps the Honor 6 Plus achieve a fast AF speed. I will have to check that claim, as the cameras come with a regular contrast-detect AF method. Just like the dual cameras seen on the HTC One M8, the dual-camera setup on the Honor 6 Plus allows you to adjust the depth of field after the fact. Conclusion Huawei has priced the Honor 6 Plus at Rs 26,499 which seems to be on the higher side, when compared to its other Chinese counterparts such as OnePlus One and Xiaomi Mi4. We will have to test out the performance of the Honor 6 Plus before we make any verdict. Also the dual-camera setup will have to be thoroughly tested to see if it is worth the hype.