Why it matters to you
If it’s a small and inexpensive Android phone you’re looking for, Huawei’s stylish Honor line has got you covered.
Good, cheap phones aren’t easy to find. But phones that are good, cheap, and small are an even rarer commodity. Fortunately, Huawei’s budget Honor brand is looking to buck that trend.
The company announced the Honor 6A this week at an event in its native China. The phone features a 5-inch, 720p display and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 430 system-on-chip. At the back, there’s a 13-megapixel camera featuring phase detection autofocus, and a fingerprint sensor located underneath. There is also a 5 megapixel front-facing camera, and the battery weighs in at a hefty 3,020mAh — generous capacity that is sure to help that 720p screen last a while on a charge.
Best of all, the Honor 6A starts at 800 yuan, or the equivalent of $116 in the United States. For that price, you get 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage. Spend a little extra, and for 1,000 yuan, or $145, Huawei will give you an extra gigabyte of RAM and twice the storage. The phone also accepts MicroSD cards up to 128GB.
In terms of software, Android 7.0 Nougat is on board, with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) in tow. If you don’t know, EMUI is Huawei’s Android skin, and it’s a pretty drastic change from the stock operating system. There’s no app drawer, for example, and many of the icons are reshaped into rounded rectangles — making it, on the surface, something of a hybrid between iOS and Android.
Because of the heavy customizations Huawei has made to the interface, system updates do tend to take a bit longer to arrive on the company’s devices. However, security patches shouldn’t suffer quite as much.
The iOS/iPhone relationship does bleed into the Honor 6A’s design as well. Looking at it from the front, with the screen off, Huawei’s budget offering is a dead-ringer for Apple’s flagships, save for the lack of a physical home button. In its place, you have the Honor logo. However, the overall shape, speaker cutout, camera and sensors up top, and the hint of shimmering aluminum along the edges mean that, from a distance, you’ll have a hard time telling it apart from Cupertino’s latest.
Fortunately, it’s available in a few colors the iPhone isn’t. You have your pick of silver, gold, pink, and blue — all with a white front. And it must be said, derivative or not, this is a good looking phone, with an all-metal unibody construction that stands out among other low-priced offerings.
The Honor 6A will be available from Chinese online retailers, like JD.com and Vmall, starting June 1. U.S. availability is unknown at this time.