Honor 6X Unboxing and Hands-on Review

Honor 6X unboxing and hands-on review: Honor brought an interesting new mid-ranger to the table at CES 2017 in the Honor 6X and we unboxed the phone so you know what you can expect should you decide to pick one up for yourself.

Honor 6X: Specs at a glance

Screen size	5.5-inches
Screen resolution	Full HD (1920×1080)
Weight	162 grams
OS	Android 6.0 Marshmallow w/ EMUI 4.1
Front camera	8-megapixels
Rear camera(s)	12/2-megapixels dual sensor
Processor	2.1GHz/1.7GHz octa-core Kirin 655
Memory	3GB RAM
Storage	32GB. Expandable via microSD up to 256GB
Battery	3340mAh

Honor 6X: Unboxing and hands-on review

As with practically every Honor phone in recent memory save for the company’s 2016 flagship, the Honor 8, the 6X comes sealed in the brand’s signature turquoise packaging, with the phone’s name foiled upon its top face.

Lifting the lid, the phone is the first thing you’ll find. Sealed in its own plastic pouch and backed by peel-off plastic with pictorial instructions highlighting elements of the phone’s body, like its SIM tray and hardware controls. Underneath you’ll then find a card container with a metal SIM tray removal tool set into its underside. Open it up and you’ll find quick-start and warranty information along with two Honor branded stickers (at least that’s what we suspect it would contain based on our previous Honor unboxings; our early review model was devoid of contents as it’s not yet store-ready).

Beneath the card container, you’ll find a white 5 volt, 2 amp USB adapter that grants the 6X some level of fast charging, as well as a colour-matched USB to microUSB cable. There’s no included case or other accessories like earphones, but for the price, the phone alone seems like more than enough.

The Honor 6X, like so many of the company’s previous affordable mid-rangers (the 5X and 5C most notably), is a phone that looks premium at a distance, only hinting at its more affordable nature when you get up close. The body is predominantly hewn from aluminium alloy, in the case of our review sample, coloured a pale gold, but the phone will also be available in grey and silver.

At the top and bottom are colour-matched plastic caps to help with antenna performance, whilst the back itself features a fingerprint sensor and a vertically aligned dual camera array. The fingerprint sensor supports gestures for navigation and additional interaction, whilst the dual 12/2-megapixel sensor boasts improved low-light performance over its predecessor and background defocus abilities thanks to that second rear sensor. You’ll also find a single LED flash.

On the front, the gold variant packs a white surround accommodating a 5.5-inch Full HD LCD panel and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. When you fire the phone up it comes running the company’s Emotion UI 4.1 atop Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but based on other Huawei and Honor handsets making the jump to EMUI 5.0 and Android Nougat, we suspect the 6X won’t be far behind.

The Honor 6X looks like it offers great value for money, with a premium design, a new processor, a sizeable 3340mAh battery (promising 2.2 days of use per charge) and that distinctive dual camera arrangement, amongst other intriguing features, all at a snip under £225. It holds a lot of promise as a top-notch mid-ranger for 2017. The phone will be available from Huawei and Honor’s own vMall online retail site as well as Amazon and Three in the UK by the end of January. Stay tuned for a full review and more.