Huawei had showcased its mid-range smartphone, the Honor 6X smartphone and the successor of the Honor 5X smartphone in China last year. And today at an event at the CES 2017 the company has announced that it will be coming to more markets soon, India included. The USP of the device being: it is among the most affordable smartphones to sport dual rear cameras. It is expected to go on sale in India later this month. Fortunately, we were given a chance to have a preview of the device prior to its official launch in India and here are our first impressions of the phone.

Design

The Honor 6X shares quite a bit similarities with its predecessor the Honor 5X with quite a few hardware improvements and refined the design to make this device even a better bargain. The device still retains the composite metal design from last year which means there is metal on this phone, but only the back plate is made of metal. The rear metal plate is surrounded by plastic windows at the top and bottom which help in antenna reception. The build quality of the device is top notch and you can’t really complain about anything. The Honor 6X has a much curvier design this time, the edges are tapered and the corners have been rounded off which makes the device sit comfortably in the hand. The hardware buttons are placed at the traditional location. The left side houses the power and volume keys, the 3.5mm headphone jack sits at the top, the hybrid sim tray is placed on the right and on the bottom there is a micro-USB charging port and two speaker grills (one being an actual speaker and another one being microphone). At the back you have a dual camera setup and a fingerprint sensor that sits just below the camera module.

Hardware

The Honor 6X has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS 2.5D curved glass panel on the front having 450 nits brightness. The device is powered by an Octa-Core Kirin 650 processor with Mali T830 GPU. In international market the device is available in two variants: 3GB|32GB or 4GB|64GB variants. But its not clear which variant will be made available in India. Although the test unit that is provided to us has 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. In terms of camera, the device features a dual camera setup: where one being a 12-megapixel Sony IMX386 sensor and the 2-megapixel secondary camera offers wide aperture range (f/0.95-f/16) to adjust the focus. In terms of front camera, the device houses an 8-megapixel selfie camera with 77-degree wide angle lens. To power the device it backs a 3340 mAh nonremovable built in battery which easily lasts more than a day on regular use.

Camera

The Honor 6X has a dual camera setup that we have earlier seen in the HTC One M8. The main primary camera is a 12 megapixel Sony IMX386 sensor and the 2MP auxiliary sensor is purely used to capture depth information which can be taken advantage of using the camera’s wide aperture mode. The wide aperture mode lets you adjust the aperture from f/16 to as down as f/0.95 for a very stylistic bokeh effect. Interestingly the phone stores the image’s original data that can be used later to change the aperture and points of focus even after capturing the shot. The overall camera experience till now has been very impressive and almost every time the Honor 6X manages to capture a good amount of sharpness and excellent dynamic range. The focus is fast and the images are pleasant surprisingly for a mid range phone. There more to come in our detailed camera review of Honor 6X in coming weeks.

Our First Impressions

The Honor 6X in terms of specifications and build quality is a great upgrade over it’s predecessor, the Honor 5X. The 6X gives a more premium feel and with curved edges and rounded corners, the device is very comfortable to hold. The camera is the highlight of this device and the rear dual camera setup manages to capture beautiful bokeh effects. Although this dual camera setup is nothing new, we have seen similar setup in HTC One M8 and Honor 8, but these are flagship devices and having a similar setup at half the price seems impressive. And with some fancy tricks under its sleeves, like EMUI’s “touch and hold” and slide gestures, the device sets it apart from the competition.

The Honor 6X houses 11% extra battery, double the storage, more cameras, better build over its predecessor, the device can be titled as a worthy successor. And with dual camera setup, good battery life, sturdy build quality, blazing fast fingerprint sensor and premium build quality then device seems to check all the boxes and could be the best smartphone in the budget segment if Honor can set the pricing right in India. Although we don’t have any word on the initial Indian pricing as yet but the device is available in the US at $249.99 or INR 17,000 approx. for the 3GB RAM with 32GB storage version. And the the 4GB RAM with 64GB storage version costs $299.99 or INR 20,500 approx. But considering this price as an approximate price in the Indian market Honor 6X is going to be one of the most competitive phones that you’ll find in its price range. We’ll continue testing out the phone and our full review will be live soon.