Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Battery life
- Impressive battery life, especially considering the Honor 5X was already great
- Will last you a full day with ease, may even stretch to 2 days
- Packs at 3,340mAh cell, which is larger than the Huawei P10
One of the highlights of the Honor 5X was the battery life, so we had big hopes for the Honor 6X – and the good news is it doesn’t disappoint.
There’s a 3340mAh battery powering the phone, and considering it’s only booting up a Full HD screen that's quite a good size.
In terms of day-to-day battery life, we found the Honor 6X would consistently last a full day even when being pushed hard. Once or twice we went to bed with only a few percent left in the tank, but it never died on us within one day.
If you're a limited user and won't be playing many games, browsing the internet lots or watching a lot of video you'll find the Honor 6X could even last you a day and a half or two days.
For our video test, we play a 90 minute video on the phone at full brightness with connectivity options on, and we found the Honor 6X had lost 15% of its battery by the end of the test.
Last year the Honor 5X lost 19%, while the Huawei Mate 9 we’ve recently tested lost 18% of its charge. The Honor 6X scored remarkably close to the best we’ve seen recently, such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, which dropped 13% and 14% respectively.
If you’re after even better battery life than what you'll find on the Honor 6X, you should go for the Huawei Mate 9, which offers stunning performance. It didn’t do so well in our video test, but in terms of day-to-day life you’d be very happy with that phone.
When it comes time to charge, you'll be using the micro USB port at the bottom of the phone. It feels a little out of place considering Huawei has been using USB-C of late, and the micro USB technology is starting to date.
It does charge quite fast though – we found it took just over two hours to go from zero to 100%. But that’s not true fast-charging, so you can find speedier options elsewhere.
There are also no wireless charging capabilities on the Honor 6X.
Camera
- Only budget phone with a dual-lens camera
- Combines a 12MP lens with a 2MP to make a wide-aperture mode
Honor has been focusing on dual-sensor rear cameras in recent months, and the Honor 6X is no different.
There’s a 12MP camera on the back of the phone that's paired with a 2MP wide-aperture lens. It allows you to blur the background of images for an interesting effect..
According to Honor, this dual-lens setup will also improve the pixel resolution of an image even in low light.
It’s not the same quality dual-lens camera as the Honor 8 with its 12MP color lens and 12MP monochrome sensor, but this is still a good setup that allows you to take wide-aperture shots. That means that, as stated, you can give photos a unique effect where you blur the background or foreground of a photo - here's an example taken by the Honor 6X.
This is something we haven’t seen on a phone with this low a price before, and it works well.
It doesn’t come out as well as on a lot of high-end phones, but it gives budget photography a different look compared to everything else on the market.
The actual sensor itself manages to capture some great looking shots too. Whenever taking well-lit landscapes we were always impressed by how the photos came out.
When you pixel-peep you start to notice how the handset isn’t taking the best photos, but considering this is less than half the price of our favorite camera phones, it's an impressive setup.
All the modes you’d expect from Honor are here as well, including light painting, HDR and a food mode dedicated to close-up shots of your dinner for Instagram.
There's an 8MP front-facing shooter for your selfies. That's as many megapixels as some rear-facing cameras have at this sort of price, so your selfies are set to be high quality.
There’s a beauty mode, which is on by default, to smooth out blemishes on your skin. You can change this to 10 different levels, but it can also be turned off by sliding across the screen.
The sample below shows beauty mode on level 5, the default setting for selfie shots.
For video recording, the rear camera can either record in 720p or Full HD. You won’t be able to record in 2K or 4K here, but that’s not something you’re going to need with only a 1080p screen to play it on.
Video recording seemed stabilized well, but the highlight is probably the video pro mode the phone offers. It allows you to fully control the look of the video, from autofocus down to the brightness of the shot.
Camera samples
Press on the arrows below to look through our camera samples.
