Huawei Honor 6 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu & Joshua Ho on September 12, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Android
- Mobile
- Honor 6
WiFi Performance
Out of all the benchmarks that we’ve ran on the Honor 6, there is one that really stands out more than anything else. The phone has one of the worst performing WiFI systems that we’ve ever tested. Coming at a top speed of 52mbps on our test bench, the device lags far behind not only other flagships, but other smartphones period.
What really is happening here is a mystery to both me and Josh. We find a BCM4334 chipset in charge of the connectivity and it is, similarly to Samsung’s Exynos series interfaced via an SDIO bus. My first suspicion was that maybe the bus bandwidth to the DWMMC controller was misconfigured, but I have no evidence of this without the kernel sources being available. This leaves the possibility that the antenna is just badly designed and has unfavorable RF characteristics such as significant impedance mismatch/high SWR. In fact this can be more or less observed as the phone has a bit of a death-grip issue regarding WiFi strength when you cover up the top part of the device. Reception is so bad that I’ve found myself losing connectivity to my router when walking around the house. Whatever the cause may be, this is easily such a negative aspect of the device that it may very well be the deciding factor for many buyers.
NAND Performance
The internal eMMC NAND storage of a phone can be a crucial factor in a device's performance. Inside the Huawei we find a Toshiba 16GB NAND chip with the system and data partitions running on an ext4 filesystem.
The performance is one of the lowest ones we find in the current-generation phones as Huawei skimped on the eMMC chip as it is outperformed by a factor of two or three by other smartphones. This is the same class model that you could find in some Galaxy S3 variants and other phones over 2.5 years ago. Only Huawei's own Ascend P7 performs worse.
The Honor 6 offers also a microSD card slot in case you want to expand your storage. The OS offers full exFat compatibility and I had no issues with my Samsung Pro 64GB card. I was however disappointed to see that the HiSilicon chip suffers from the same limitation that plagues other SoCs for no good reason: the DWMMC controller in charge of the SD-card is limited to SDR50 speeds, meaning that you won't be able to exceed ~35mB/s transfer speeds on your microSD, no matter how fast it actually is. It still baffles me that OEMs refuse to address this even almost 2 years after the first UHS-1 cards have been made widely available.
Next, let's look at the camera system of the Honor 6.
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imaheadcase - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
By the time you need to replace the battery you will be getting a new phone anyways..so its a moot point.Alexey291 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
6 months in case of one of my phones? Damn thing expanded and basically lost about 50% of its capacity (I'm being generous here). The amount of effort it took to get it through warranty process (leaving me without a phone in the meantime)... Because you know "its still working isn't it?"Never again tyvm.
Stuka87 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
"Takes up literally no space"Seriously? Do you understand what the meaning of "literally" is?
Alexey291 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
I would have long since edited it to "literally no -extra- space" (because you know that would have worked as an exaggeration and that is pretty much what I wanted to say) but alas the comment system here is poop :)But you did have a point to make didn't you? Oh no you're just being an idiot. Fair enough.
semo - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
So just the planned obsolescence then. Why isn't this considered outrageous? Maybe because marketing has convinced users that points 1 and 2 are actual problems (as Alexey291 has pointed out, that's not the case). Maybe you can't really make a oh la la looking phone with a removable battery like the HTC One but we don't all want or like such devices.Why can the auto industry cater to such a large number of wants/needs but the phone industry can't? They only make the same looking huge phones with sealed batteries, no Qi, no expandable storage, single SIM only, etc... It feels like there is no choice unless you want something practical and pocket friendly (a proper HTC Sensation successor would be nice)
Alexey291 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
Hear hear!Ethos Evoss - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
jesus chris people GET OVER with replacing battery stupidness ! seriously .. you looking only what that phone doesn't what it doesn't have .. it has powerfull 3000 batt jesus christ people grow upsemo - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
Why is that such a big problem for you? There's plenty of phones for you to choose from if you must have a sealed battery. Why can't the rest of us have a choice?Alexey291 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
that's until that cheap but (supposedly) powerful 3kmah battery swells and damages the phone's internal structure. Loses 50% of its original capacity. All in under 6 months.And before you say "that never happens" it happens very damn often especially in Huawei and Xiaomi phones >.>
semo - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link
And don't expect the likes of Zerolemon and Anker to offer a better/bigger battery as they generally don't support non user replaceable batteries (most users won't bother unless they can just pop the battery in).