Honor 6 review

As a media player the Honor 6 has a number of elements going in its favour. Chief among those is its 5-inch 1080p display, which renders video and games with the sharpness and accuracy of a phone twice its price.

It's a shame that the Honor 6's speaker is so bad, as outlined earlier. The one weedy speaker offers little oomph, and its weird placement on the rear right of the device (as you're watching the screen) meant that I found myself cupping my hand around the back in order to funnel the sound around to the front. It worked, but I really shouldn't have to do that.

Unusually, Huawei doesn't pack its own video player in here. It has a gallery app that allows you to watch back captured and downloaded video clips, and a file manager that offers a video category, but otherwise it leaves things to Google's own pre-installed Google Play Movies & TV app. This lets you purchase, rent, and watch movies and TV shows.

Huawei has bundled its own dedicated music app, but it's extremely basic. You get albums, artists, and playlists categories, the latter of which presents itself as a variety of 'mood' headers. Don't think that these will smartly sort your music collection accordingly though, you'll have to add them manually.

You're better off going with the Google Music app, which is also bundled. As you're probably aware by now, this offers a slick interface for your music, a complete MP3 music store, a Spotify-like subscription service, and the ability to upload 20,000 of your own songs to the cloud. It's pretty much all you need on the music front.

Both music apps offer a notification menu widget for skipping and pausing tracks, though only Huawei's own seems to have been granted a lock screen equivalent, which is a little disappointing.

Sound quality on the Honor 6 - through a decent set of headphones at least - is good, with a good rich low end sound. Bass heads should feel particularly at home.

As hinted at in the performance section, the Honor 6 is great for games. Its 5-inch display is a great size for rendering the most technically advanced 3D games, but compact enough to make wielding traditional virtual controls a doddle (which they often aren't on tablets, for example).

I tried a variety of games during my test period, and the Honor 6 was as well suited to the delicate 2D aerial acrobatics of Retry and the skilful platformer play of Mikey Shorts as it was for the usual blockbuster 3D fare. All of them looked great here, too, and there were no performance issues.

You get 16GB of internal storage as standard in the Honor 6, but there's also a handily placed microSD slot situated right by the SIM slot, beneath a fiddly flap.