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Battery life
- Large 3,020mAh battery leads to strong stamina
- Beats much of the competition
The Honor 6A is making a big play for the stamina market - those for whom the length of time between charges is at least as important as performance or screen resolution.
Its 3,020mAh battery is quite large for a phone of this size and capability. There are flagship Android phones with much sharper displays and more powerful chipsets that pack smaller batteries (the Samsung Galaxy S8 for one).
Last year’s Honor 5C also had a slightly smaller 3,000mAh battery, despite also having a larger and sharper display.
Honor states that the Honor 6A will last 12 hours of HD video playback. We’re not sure under which conditions it makes this prediction, but we did get some positive results from our usual video-based battery test.
Running a 90 minute looping 720p video with the screen brightness cranked up to full and all notifications turned on, the Honor 6A used up a little less than 19% of its battery life on average.
Compare that to the Wileyfox Swift 2, which shed 32% of its battery life, and the Moto G5 and its 22%, and this is a positive result.
Arguably more impressive was the Honor 6A’s battery performance under gaming load. Playing 15 minutes of Guns of Boom sapped just 3% of the phone’s battery. Recently, the Wileyfox Spark X ate 7% under the same load.
In general, this is a phone that will last well beyond a day under moderate load - and can stomach being pushed harder without necessitating a trip to a wall socket.
Interestingly, Honor also advertises the fact that the Honor 6A’s battery will last 800 cycles before it starts to lose its efficiency, which effectively equates to more than two years.
Camera
- 13MP camera can capture some strikingly vibrant pictures
- Struggles with low light and dynamic range
The Honor 6A is capable of taking some remarkably strong photos, especially considering its budget price - though you need the ideal conditions to do so.
It comes equipped with a 13MP sensor, and the addition of phase detection autofocus ensures that it locks on to its subject relatively quickly. Honor claims that this process is as quick as 0.5 seconds.
That is, when it locks on. We found that we still often needed to give the camera a helping finger to set the appropriate focal point, lest we be left with blurry images.
Once the phone did lock on, though, we managed to snag some really crisp and vibrant images. In the case of a few well-lit close-ups, the phone also supplied some pleasing bokeh, blurring out the background like a high-end DSLR.
However, the camera struggles with the usual budget phone foes of low light and dynamic range.
On the former point, taking shots in less than optimal lighting - from indoors during a bright day or an outdoors street scene at night - led to plenty of noise and a struggle locking onto any form of detail.
As for dynamic range, when taking pictures in a park on a sunny day the Honor 6A captured the subject very well indeed, but areas where the sun shone through were completely blown out. Oh, for an HDR mode.
Selfie fans get a 5MP front-facing camera that will do the job for social media shares, but that’s about it.
Still, the fact that the Honor 6A can take decent images of any kind is worthy of praise. True, it’s not the only budget phone to be able to do this, but we still see an awful lot that can’t.
