Ok, what do we have here? Huawei, hmm…Apparently, not your usual Made in China 5 dolla copycat, but a genuine product made with blood sweat and tears, from scratch, by the honest little yellow people living in the land of the Dragon.
The Huawei Honor is THE Chinese smartphone, built to make them proud. The reason for that is simple, Huawei is a very serious corporation, as big as, let’s say, Motorola, one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies and they’ve been making mobile phones too, especially low end ones, besides telecom equipment and IT related stuff.
The Honor is a big step towards the smartphone market, kind of setting the standard from now for Huawei, their swan song, their prodigy child.
With its 1.4 Ghz CPU which powers the Gingerbread running android device, featuring an 8 Megapixels camera and a 4” FWVGA screen, we can stand in awe before the Huawei’s current flagship smartphone.
Key Features
• Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G support
• 14.4 Mbps HSDPA; 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• 1.4GHz Snapdragon CPU; Adreno 205 GPU; Qualcomm MSM 8255ΠΆ chipset; 512MB RAM; 4GB ROM
• 1GB storage, micro SD card support (up to 32GB)
• 4.0” LCD display of FWVGA (854 x 480) resolution; 245ppi pixel density
• 8 megapixel auto-focus camera with geotagging and HDR; HD (720p@30fps) video recording, LED flash
• Front-facing VGA camera
• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread with custom Huawei launcher
• Custom lock screen with shortcuts to messaging, camera and missed calls
• Huawei Cloud + Store offer exclusive content and 16GB of cloud storage
• Wi-Fi b/g/n; hot-spot and DLNA connectivity
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
• GPS with A-GPS; Digital compass
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
• Accelerometer, Gyroscope and proximity sensor
• Stereo FM radio
• Active noise cancellation with secondary mic
• Office document viewer
• Powerful 1900 mAh Li-Po battery
• Web browser with Adobe Flash 11 support
• Smart dialing
Full specs here.
These are the main specs and they look impressive, but Honor kind of disappoints in terms of design, it has a cheap look and a boring appearance, in a world dominated by iPhones and shiny stars like Galaxy from Samsung.
First things first, let’s start with the dimensions. At 122 x 61 x 11 mm, Huawei looks pretty sharp for a smartphone with a 4” screen but at 140 grams it’s not the lightest android on the market. Even if it has a metal frame surrounding the screen, it still lacks character, the cheap gloss doesn’t help much either.
The main attraction of the front side of the device is the 4" capacitive LCD of FWVGA (480 x 854) resolution. Despite the pretty good specs sheet of the display, in reality it failed to impress me.
Below the display you'll find four capacitive buttons for Home, Menu, Back and Search, above the display there's the usual earpiece, along with a secondary VGA camera and a proximity sensor to disable the display during calls.
On the bottom we can find the micro USB port for data transfers and charging, on the top the power lock button and the 3.5 mm audio jack.
The back panel is made of glossy plastic and it’s prone to smudges, also here we can find the 8 MP camera lens and the loudspeaker.
Under the back lid we can see a huge 1900 mAh Li-Po battery, under the battery lays the SIM card and the micro SD card slot.
In terms of construction, there are no weak spots, just the sub-par quality display and too much glossy plastic for my taste.
The phone fits decent in both hand and pocket and it’s relatively easy to use with one hand, despite its large screen.
Huawei Honor is a true droid in the deepest sense of the word, the platform version is 2.3.5 Gingerbread and Huawei have gone a long way in customizing it. The custom Huawei launcher offers an entirely different layout, options, appearance and much more.
In terms of processing power, Huawei does a really good job, the rice burner is powered by a 1.4 GHz MSM8255T Snapdragon processor and 512 MB RAM.
Thing is, we’re living in a world of dual core or even quad core flagships, a single core droid is nothing to write home about. But I must remind you that not all people are high tech geeks looking for multi core CPU’s in their pocket. Not to mention the price you have to pay for such gimmicks.
Huawei Honor features its very own phonebook magic trick, is its Streams feature. You can preset your Facebook and Twitter accounts to display content from your Facebook buddies and subscribed people and the ones on Twitter you're following.
In terms of telephony, everything looks ok, there were no problem with signal reception/transmission, and the phone performs well in this regard.
In the music department, again, there were no issues, the music player is decent and the sound quality is acceptable.
Huawei Honor features a camera of 8 MP capable of 3264x2448 resolution photos. It has autofocus, a single LED flash, geo-tagging and HDR. It produces pretty accurate still pictures, details are good and the colors look natural, even if it’s not among the best 8MP shooters, there are no complaints.
A major achievement is in the video recording department, Huawei captures smooth 720p videos at 30 fps, and the only downside is the small amount of details.
Huawei Honor comes with lots of apps preinstalled, it also features an office suite called Documents to Go, and you can also download many free/paid apps from the Android Market to suit your needs.
In conclusion, Huawei Honor is a decent smartphone, even if the brand is not very popular amongst android users. The Chinese company is trying to change that with a good midrange option with some high-end specs, especially for people with tight budgets.
You can get your Huawei on a monthly contract deal here.
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