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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t.s. - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
My friend Galaxy Note 2 battery have been replaced 2 times. Imagine if his phone battery is a non removable type. Does everyone have a same usage pattern with u? sigh.Ethos Evoss - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
http://mobile.zol.com.cn/468/4687718.htmlvery easy open phone .. same like on xperia z2 !
semo - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
No user replaceable battery means no support from the manufacturer which makes it really hard to get a hold of an original battery. After market batteries will most likely will be of a low quality as the market will be small (most people don't like tinkering). The battery if the HTC Sensation was easy to remove.What you linked to does not compare.Ethos Evoss - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Yeah like in exploding samsung mobiles :D JUST because is possible to repace battery !! DANGEROUS!squirrelboy - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Does this phone suffer from the same battery bulging issue that the P6 has?In the 2 months I worked for a company that handles "loanphones" (phones people get when their own phone is out for repair) I noticed that about 1 in 5 Huawei P6's had their back come loose as a result of a bulging, damaged battery.
Jon Tseng - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Blimey. Hisilicon have managed to pop out A15 big.little with integrated LTE modem (shame you were unable to test it in the field; presumably its okay if its cleared carrier certification).That's impressive, despite the rough edges. Remember this is a feat which has so far eluded the might of Intel, Broadcom, Renesas, NVIDIA, Mediatek and (I'm sure) a bunch of other industry luminaires.
The Chinese are coming... :-x
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
We'll be revisiting the LTE modem in the Ascend Mate 7 as it has the proper RF backend to work with FDD networks.jjj - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Was curious how their LTE does , guess that's for another time.JoshuaLastname - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO DO A REVIEW FOR THE MEIZU MX4 ? I'm dying to see a proper benchmarking suite of the gpu.Achtung_BG - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Meizu MX4 in GFXbench 3.0 1080p off-screen results 398 framesHuwaei honor 6 results 495 frames