Honor 6X Review: Dual Camera Premium Android For Less

Even value-oriented smartphones can be fairly trim and Huawei’s Honor 6X is just 0.32 inches thick. And that’s at its thickest; the phone’s aluminum back slopes toward the glass display along the back edges, making the phone look even slimmer from some angles. Yes, the extended bezel for the dual camera breaks up phone’s smooth lines, but not enough to detract from the overall sleekness of the Honor 6X.


Interestingly, the extended camera bezel makes locating the fingerprint reader easy when you’re holding the phone. The fingerprint reader is a small, circular depression just below the cameras. We found that we were consistently tapping the lower camera (and sometimes both cameras) when locating the fingerprint reader, but that didn’t seem to have any effect on the quality of the pictures the Honor 6X shot.


The Honor 6X weighs 5.71 ounces and is 5.94 inches tall x 3 inches wide. The phone fits well in our hands, but the smoothness of the body (and the slope of the edges) worked a little against us. We found the phone sliding through our fingers when we weren’t careful. Even so, the effect of the sloped back edge and the curved glass along the front edge of the display makes the phone look much more elegant than your typical value phone.

We also ran into the same problem we’ve encountered with other phones that have speakers along the bottom edge: depending on how one holds the phone, one of the speakers can be blocked by a finger or palm. Still, that’s a minor issue.


As we mentioned earlier, the 5.5-inch display features a 1920 x 1080 resolution. It’s reasonably bright, at 450 nits, but we had to crank the brightness all the way to the max when watching video, which is a little unusual. For context, Huawei Honor 8 offers about 500 nits, and the iPhone 7 is in the neighborhood of 600 nits, though it can go even brighter under certain circumstances.

Images looked crisp and colorful to us. Huawei points out that the Honor 6X’s display reproduces 16 million colors, and although some users have complained about washed-out colors, we found the display to be relatively accurate. We also noticed that the display picked up fingerprints quite easily and we felt the need to clean it a little more often than we have with most phones. But again, we’re looking at an unlocked phone with a very affordable price tag, and with that in mind, we like its display just fine and think it will meet the expectations of most mainstream users.


The Honor 6X has standard volume and screen lock buttons on its left side, within easy reach of your fingers if you hold the phone in your left hand. Those are the only buttons on the phone, which makes for a sleek profile. The top of the phone sports a 3.5mm audio jack for your headphones (which aren’t included) while the bottom of the phone sports the aforementioned speakers and a microUSB port for the included charger. That’s bound to get a “meh” response from some users, with USB Type C showing up in popular devices of late but its certainly not a big shortcoming.


The only slot on the right side of the phone is the SIM/microSD slot. Pop the tray open with the included key, and you have access to two card trays, one of which doubles as a microSD card slot for expandable storage.