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Huawei announced not one, but two phones at its Honor 6 Plus
launch event. Apart from the flagship Huawei Honor 6 Plus, we also saw the
release of the budget-oriented Huawei Honor 4X. Honor is Huawei’s online only
brand and all phones with the Honor name tag will be sold online – a model that
is seeing increasing traction in India. Motorola started the trend with the
Moto G which was sold exclusively on Flipkart and this was followed by a lot
many players with Xiaomi being the most prominent. Recently, Micromax’s online
only subsidiary Yu Televentures launched the Yu Yureka, exculsively on Amazon.
Looking at the relative success of these companies, it is safe to assume that
this model is working wonders for brands as compared to purely offline sales.
Let us see how the Honor 4X fares and if it will be a threat to the incumbents.
Build and
Design
Considering this is a 5.5-inch phone, the immediate
competitors include the Yu Yureka and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G. When compared with
the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4G, the Honor 4X comes across as comparitively thinner
and lighter phone. The model we got came with a white textured back. The rear
cover has the Honor logo etched into it and the cover is easily removable. The
plastic used in the construction is not the sturdiest, but not as flimsy as the
Lenovo A6000 either.
On opening the cover you get access to the dual SIM card
slots along with the microSD card slot. The battery is non removable. On the
rear side, you have the camera section along with the LED flash unit beside it,
located on the top left hand corner.
On the front-face, you have a display which lacks any
Corning protection. The screen is a fingerprint magnet and you will need to
constantly clean it. At the top, you have the earpiece speaker along with the
proximity sensor and the front-facing camera. At the base there are the
home, back and menu buttons which have the triangle, circle
and square shapes as seen on Android 5.0 Lollipop handsets.
The phone measures 8.7mm thick and you have the volume
rocker and power/standby button on the right hand side whereas the left hand
edge is clean. Coming to the top, you have a 3.5mm audio jack and at the base
you have a microUSB charging port and a speaker section beside it. Overall
build quality is quite good.
Features
Huawei has decided to target the budget segment with the
Honor 4X. It sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC which houses a 1.2GHz
quad-core Cortex A53 processor which is paired with Adreno 306 GPU and 2GB of
RAM. The phone has 8GB of internal storage of which only 4.05GB is free for
users. You can add on a microSD card of up to 32GB storage capacity.
It sports a 5.5-inch HD display which gives a pixel density
of 267ppi. On the OS front, we get an Android 4.4.4 KitKat along with the
Emotion UI 3.0 interface. The rear 13MP camera is complemented by a 2MP
front-facing camera. The Honor 4X is powered by a non-removable 3,000 mAh
battery.
Software
Huawei Honor 4X comes with the Emotion UI 3.0 on top of the
Android 4.4.4 KitKat OS. As we have seen with a lot of Chinese phone makers in the
past – Xiaomi, Oppo and Gionee, the
Emotion UI 3.0 also doesn’t have an app drawer. You have the apps arranged in a
4×5 grid. The default theme has icons with rounded edges, but of course you can
change this theme if you so wish. Among the proprietary apps we have Themes and
Phone Manager which has menus such as phone accelerator, harassment filter,
power saving, traffic manager, notification manager, app lock and so on. The
Tool folder has a lot of utility apps such as Mirror, Magnifier, Torch, Notepad,
Recorder, FM radio, Backup and so on. With the Themes app, just like with the
Cyanogen OS on the OnePlus One, you can customise the fonts, wallpaper, lock
transition screen, home wallpaper from multiple themes and make your own custom
theme.
The lock screen has a slider at the base which when pulled
up gives you quick access to weather, voice recorder, calculator, torch and
camera apps. Taking a screenshot, shows you a preview of the image and gives
you options to edit or share the screenshot on the spot.
Just like Xiaomi MIUI, the notification drawer reveals two
sections – Notifications and Shortcuts. As the name implies, the Shortcuts
gives you access to quick menus such as bluetooth, brightness adjustment,
auto-rotate, settings and so on, which can be rearranged according to your
preference. The notification tab shows you the notifications in an interesting
timeline sort of a user interface. Settings menu is straight-forward and there
are motion gesture as well.
Long pressing on the square shaped menu button, brings up
the recent apps which can be swiped off to shut the app or pulled down upon and
released to lock them. To clear all the apps you just swipe from the base to
the top.
Video quality was decent and the speakers were loud enough
to watch movies or videos without earphones. Despite the speaker being on one
side, the phone is loud enough. There wasn’t any distortion of volume at
maximum levels either. While playing games such as Asphalt 8, one can notice a
lot of jaggies and there is a definite stuttering.
Display
Huawei Honor 4X comes with a 5.5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel
display. The display comes without any protective covering and the scratch
guard that comes on the phone is a fingerprint and smudge magnet. The display
does have a very slight warm tinge to it. Overall the display is sharp,
although sunlight legibility is not the best on Auto-brightness mode. Movie
viewing was a good experience, but the reflective display is annoying in dark
scenes. There wasn’t a noticeable backlight bleeding.
Camera
Huawei Honor 4X has a 13MP rear camera and a 2MP front
camera. This is the highest resolution camera in this budget, I have seen so
far. The camera has a minimal interface and looks quite similar to the one seen
with the Xiaomi Mi 4 as well as the iPhone 6/6 Plus. The animations when you
hit on the settings menu is quite similar to the one seen on the MIUI 6.0
on the Xiaomi Mi 4. It has feature such as Panorama, HDR,
audio note, Best photo, all focus and watermark. The All Focus feature lets you
set the focus after the fact, a feature that is increasingly being seen in a
lot of phone cameras. The Watermark feature requires a working internet
connection and basically adds in the days temperature in a bottom corner.
Theres an ultra-snapshot mode which basically lets you take a quick photograph
by double clicking on the volume up button even if the phone is off. It can
shoot full HD videos.
Image quality is mediocre, once again proving the fact that
a higher megapixel count does not a great camera make. Daylight images lacked
sharpness and on pixel peeping showed a lot of dithering. Photographs clicked
indoors were noisy and there is a prominent barrel distortion around the edges.
Also the HDR mode does not really help balance out the shadows and highlights.
Quite an ordinary camera.
Battery life
The phone comes with a 3,000mAh battery. This is a battery
capacity we have generally seen on phones sporting at least a full HD display.
In terms of real life usage, it does not disappoint. With the PC Mark for
Android battery life test, we got 10 hours 19 mins battery life, which is quite
impressive. This means that the phone can easily last you a full day to a day
and half of regular use cases. It also comes with an Ultra power saving mode
which can be activated directed from the shortcuts menu.
