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Huawei Honor 6X review

 2017 has just started, but 2016's trend of affordable, high-performance phones shows no sign of stopping if the Huawei Honor 6X is any indication. At $249, the 32GB Honor 6X launches at a price $50 higher than last year's Honor 5X, but brings with it a host of improvements that are worth the extra coin, like smoother overall performance and a better camera with a unique secondary lens for bokeh. The UI layer is still heavy, but it's free from the slowdown we experienced on the previous generation.

Design, Features, and Display

The design of the Honor 6X hasn't changed much from the previous model. The brushed finish is gone, the fingerprint sensor is circular instead of square, and there are two camera sensors on the back. But it's still a metal unibody slab available in gold, gray, or silver.
The phone measures 5.9 by 3.0 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.7 ounces, nearly identical to the 5X. Like those phones, it's a bit too wide to reach across with your thumb, but there's a Mini Screen mode that lets you shrink what's shown and move the keyboard to one side to make use with one hand easier.
The volume rocker and power button can both be found on the right, a 3.5mm audio jack is on the top, and the bottom holds a micro USB charging port sandwiched between a microphone and speaker grille. The left side has SIM and microSD card slots. The latter worked fine with a 256GB card, and can also take a second SIM instead, if you want to use two different numbers.
Honor 6X back
The fingerprint sensor on the back is as fast and responsive as the one found on the Honor 8. It has a similar set of programmable features that allow you to touch and hold it to take a photo when the camera app is open, or swipe left or right to browse photos.
The front is home to a 5.5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-pixel IPS LCD, the same resolution as the Honor 8. Color reproduction is good, and also highly customizable, letting you choose between warm and cold color temperatures. Viewing angles are good, and the phone has a setting that further improves brightness under sunlight. There's also a blue light filter that can be enabled to reduce eye strain at night.

Network Performance and Connectivity

The Honor 6X is a GSM phone with LTE bands 2/4/5/12/20/38, like the Honor 8. Call quality is good. Voices come across with a clear, natural tone free from any robotic edge. Earpiece volume is loud enough to be heard in noisy settings, but the speakerphone isn't very strong even when Loud Voice mode is enabled. On the other end, noise cancellation is good, blotting out traffic noise, though occassionally the sound of wind caused some crackling.
Honor 6X right

Processor and Battery

The 6X is powered by Huawei's proprietary Kirin 655 octa-core chipset clocked at 2.1GHz. It's a capable processor and with 3GB of RAM, regular usage is a breeze. The Honor 6X has none of the stuttering or sluggishness of its predecessor. Multitasking is smooth, switching between apps is swift, and I never encountered any instances of slowdown.
Battery life is also solid, but nothing to write home about. The phone clocked 5 hours, 35 minutes in our rundown test. The phone has fast charging with the included adapter, and a built-in Battery Manager that lets you reduce power drain by controlling which apps run in the background. There also also two different power saving modes.
Honor 6X camera

Camera

The Honor 6X uses a dual-sensor camera setup with one 12-megapixel shooter on the top and a 2-megapixel sensor on the bottom. The camera does a nice job in well-lit settings. Pictures are clear and detailed, and autofocus locks on quickly. Like all midrange phones, shots become grainy in dimmer light, but enabling HDR or Night mode does help reduce some of the muddiness (at the cost of longer focus and post-processing times). However, in more challenging low-light settings, pictures look dull and there's a fair amount of noise and blur.
The purpose of the secondary sensor is to allow for bokeh in Wide Aperture mode. Wide Aperture shots taken by the 6X worked well indoors and out, successfully focusing on objects in the foreground and attractively blurring out the area behind it, as you can see in the shot below. It's a fun setting to play with, and you can also use it post-capture by pressing a shutter icon at the bottom of the photo frame and changing the focus point.
R2D2 bokeh
In addition to its various modes and filters, the 6X has manual controls (accessible under Pro Camera and Pro Video mode after swiping left), letting you adjust ISO, white balance, aperture, and focus. It also records stable 1080p video at 30fps, but lower light recording suffers from graininess. The 8-megapixel front-facing camera takes clear shots, but it can be soft depending on lighting.

Software

The Honor 6X ships running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with Huawei's custom EMUI skin on top. Huawei hasn't said whether the phone will get Nougat, but it seems likely given the Honor 5X's update history (from Lollipop to Marshmallow).
The EMU 4.1 skin is a fairly heavy layer, largely identical to the one we saw on the Honor 8. At $249, the Honor 6X has a nice build, fast performance, and cool camera capabilities. The Honor 6X is a solid buy, and a promising start to the year.

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