Honor X6 Review: Affordable But Still Overpriced!

In September 2022, Honor launched a new smartphone of its X series, dubbed Honor X6. Honor X6 is the fourth phone in this series to launch in Nepal.

Priced at Rs. 18,490, the Honor X6 is a budget phone powered by MediaTek Helio G25 chipset. I have been using the Honor X6 for some time, and I will be sharing my experience with the phone. So, let’s start the Honor X6 review.

Honor X6 Review

Design

• 163.66 x 75.13 x 8.68 mm
• 194 g
• Dual SIM (Nano-SIM, dual stand-by)
• Plastic frame and back

The design of the Honor X6 is quite good for a budget phone. I have the device in Titanium Silver color, and its back has a frosted glass appearance, although it’s plastic. It both feels and looks good.

The upper portion has a big square camera island that includes three camera circles and a flash. The size of this camera layout is bigger than necessary, but since every phone comes with a big camera these days, the Honor X6 is merely following the trend.

Nevertheless, the rear look of the Honor X6 is great. But when it comes to the front design, it will be obvious that this is a budget phone. Because of the dated waterdrop notch and a big chin bezel, the front does not look appealing.

The frame of the device is also made of plastic. One bad thing I immediately noticed when using this phone is its power button. The power button is slightly inside the device frame, which makes it hard to click the button.

It also makes it difficult to locate the button with fingers without looking — something you can do on almost all other phones. Normally, in other phones as well with a fingerprint sensor on the power button, the button is flat, but it’s not this uncomfortable. Though over time you may get used to it. Talking about the fingerprint sensor, it’s reliable.

ALSO READ: Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro Review: Good Sound and Great ANC

Display

• 6.5-inch IPS LCD
• HD+ Display (720 x 1600)

It has a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display with only HD+ resolution. And it also does not feature a high refresh rate. The Honor X6 has a typical display found in entry-level phones.

The colors and sharpness are average. The brightness is enough for indoor use, but you may find it difficult to clearly view the display outdoors on a sunny day.

Performance

• MediaTek Helio G25 (12 nm)
• Octa-core (4×2.0 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.5 GHz Cortex-A53)
• PowerVR GE8320
• 4GB RAM 64GB storage, supports microSD card

Honor X6 is powered by a MediaTek Helio G25 chipset and comes with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage.

Built on a 12nm process, the Helio G25 is integrated with PowerVR GE8320 GPU and has two clusters of eight ARM Cortex-A53, four cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz, and the rest at up to 1.5GHz.

Being this a two-year-old chipset all powered by not-so-powerful cores, you cannot expect good performance out of this processor. You can tell that by using this phone. Considering the performance of the phone, I find the price of this device to be expensive.

Even when doing normal tasks, I found the device to be slow and laggy. Benchmark scores of the device are also nothing interesting.

When comparing the CPU performance scores — tested on Geekbench 5 — of the Honor X6 with the similarly priced Redmi 10 (Snapdragon 680), the Honor X6’s single-core performance was almost one-third and its multi-score was almost half of that of the Redmi 10.

I tried to run 3DMark Wild Life test as well to get some GPU scores, but it said that the device does not support all the Vulkan features required, so could not test it.

For gaming, you may play light games on it, but when it comes to graphics-intensive games, the experience would not be that enjoyable.

I played PUBG on it. The graphics can only be set to “balanced” and the frame rate to “medium”. When graphics were set to “smooth” and frame rate to “medium”, I was getting an average of 24 fps with a lot of stutters.

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Camera

• Rear Camera: 50 MP, f/1.8 (main)
  • 2MP, (macro)
  • 2MP (depth)
  • Video: 1080p@30fps
• Front Camera: 5 MP

The phone has a 50MP main camera accompanied by a 2MP depth and 2MP macro camera. Macro photos are unsurprisingly bad with unnatural colors and soft details.

NORMAL PHOTOS

The photos from the main camera are also average. The photos are usually not exposed correctly resulting in darker photos. The dynamic range is also not that great. The details come out good in good lighting conditions, but the sharpness again is unimpressive.

The colors are satisfactory. It takes decent photos in a bright environment, but the photo may not come out well in difficult lighting conditions.

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FRONT CAMERA

The 5MP front camera is also mediocre. Selfies tend to lack clarity and details, and the colors are also average. And noise starts appearing once the light goes down.

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VIDEO

Honor X6 can record up to 1080p at 30fps. The video quality of the Honor X6 is also unsatisfactory. The dynamic range is poor, the shadows are not exposed properly, and there are also fewer details. And the video is shaky.

It’s not uncommon for budget phones to have bad video quality. The quality would be okay to record casual videos.

Battery and OS

• 5000mAh battery
• USB Type-C
• Android 11
• Magic UI 6.1

The phone has a 5000mAh battery. The battery life is really good. It lasted me over a day on a single charge. But the charging speed is disappointing. It only supports 10W charging, which takes over 3.5 hours to fully charge the device.

In terms of software, Honor X6 runs on Magic UI 6.1 based on Android 12. It comes with a handful of bloatware, but you can uninstall most of them.

Should You Buy Honor X6?

Honor X6 has a very good design for its price. However, I regret to say that other aspects of the phone are really disappointing. The phone should have provided better performance for the money. The camera and display are also average.

Battery life is good, but it does not support fast charging so, charging speed is slow. This phone also lacks an ultrawide camera.

So, I feel like Honor X6 is overpriced for what it offers.

If you add a couple of thousands more, I would recommend you get the Samsung Galaxy F22, which has a better camera and display, and performance. Or, if you are looking for performance, you can go with Poco M5, Redmi 10 Prime 2022, or Redmi 10.

ALSO READ: Honor Mobiles Price in Nepal: Features and Specs

So this is my Honor X6 review. What do you think of the honor X6? Let me know in the comments!

Also, watch our review video of the Honor X6 in Nepali.