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.

WiFi Performance - UDP

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.

Internal NAND - Sequential Write

Internal NAND - Sequential Read

Internal NAND - Random Write

Internal NAND - Random Read

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.

Display Camera & Video Recording
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  • Achtung_BG - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    Kirin920/925 is very intrasting SoC compared with MediaTek 6595( 4 cortex A17, 4 cortex A17 GPU PowerVR6200) in mid phone class 200-300$
  • johnny_boy - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    As someone who doesn't game, this SoC is pretty interesting. Being interested in mainly web performance, this phone looks fairly attractive for the price. This obsession with phone/tablet GPU performance is a bit puzzling, and there should be options with strong CPU performance and middling GPU performance for those of us who only do casual or once-in-a-blue-moon phone/tablet gaming. What percentage of tablet users are utilizing the full power of their Tegra K1 GPU, or phone users utilizing the full power or their Snapdragon 801 (Adreno 330) GPU? My bet is few.
  • johnny_boy - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    Whoops, I forgot there's only one K1 tablet out right now, and it's a gaming one! So probably 100% of K1 users ARE utilizing that fullness of that GPU!
  • hendry07 - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    if im not mistaken, there are 2 K1 Tablets that are out right now. MiPad , and Shield.
  • soccerballtux - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    how do you burn through 3100mAh in 1.6483 hours that is beyond me
  • tuxRoller - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    By having it use about 6W/hr;)
  • masimilianzo - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    Great having reviews for chinese only phones! They are great! Nubias, Meizu, Xiaomi, Huawei. Please keep going reviewing this stuff
  • NeatOman - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    I just want to note something that is not brought up nearly as much or at all, the lighting that affects the screens... over many years I've seen screen look better then other in certain light and in other light other screens come out ahead. Long story short, my Nexus 5 looks much better in the sun then my friends iPhone 5c.. the colors seam to be almost *enhanced* if you will while the iPhone although very clear in the sun still looked washed out. Also if you have polorized glassed on the iPhone screen gets wired (kind cool lol) and the Nexus 5 is perfectly visible both vertically and horizontally (the Nexus 4's screen would go totally black if it was held sideways with polarized glasses on).

    So despite not being as bright outright, it handles sunlight hitting the screen much much better then a iPhone 5//5s/5c, especially with glasses on.
  • johnny_boy - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    Nice looking phone. Too bad about the crappy wifi and flash performance, because that should be a dealbreaker for almost anyone.
  • p51d007 - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    I have a Huawei Ascend Mate2, and it has a non removable battery. Considering it is a 4000mAH battery, it doesn't matter. Even with a 6.1" screen, it lasts 2-3 days on average. Some have questioned when they released it with a Snapdragon 400 SOC along with a 720p screen. I even had doubts until I started seeing reviews & actual users that have it. Some also questioned the lack of kit kat, sticking it with JB 4.3, but, I bet the majority of users won't care. It's fast, the screen is crystal clear, unless you are a pixel peeper that holds the device 2 inches from your nose! If more and more "mid spec" devices start showing promise, perhaps the days of over priced super spec devices will start to dissipate. Do you "really" need an 8 core 1080p screen? The apps can't really take advantage of all that speed anyway.

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