Off late, Huawei is putting a lot of emphasis into its smartphone business. In the last one year, it has also managed to get the eyeballs with its Honor Holly, Ascend P7, and Honor 6 smartphones.
The Chinese telecommunication giant has now come out with two new handsets – Honor 4X and Honor 6 Plus -in India. Meanwhile, we managed to got the Honor 4X for testing and here is our findings.
Design
The Huawei Honor 4X is available in both white and black colours – the former was given to us for review. Frankly, I never liked the white models of most smartphones like many as they tend to be a bit dull and thus they generally cost a bit less. However, I was pretty impressed with the overall appearance of the white version of Honor 4X and would not mind recommending it. Only if you are a mess and tend to stain your devices, you should go for the black model.
As far as the body is concerned, the Huawei Honor 4X looks quite a high end device with slim profile. It is just 8.7 mm thick (Dimension: 77.3×151.9×8.7 mm) and weighs 170 grams which is certainly on the lower side for a phone with 5.5 inch display and a 3000 mAh battery. Owing to its slim profile and plastic back panel with pattern design and matte finish, gripping it wasn’t that difficult.
Note that the plastic panel is removable but the internal battery is not. The two SIM card slots and the micro SD card slot is located beneath this rear panel. The rear cover is fairly tough and overall, the phone gives a bit of confidence of durability.
The rear panel has a camera unit and a flash light, neatly placed at the top left side inside a metal armour that not only gives a good contrast to the back panel but also prevents the camera lens and flash light from getting damaged.
The speaker grill lies at the bottom panel alongside the Micro USB port and a tiny microphone hole. Another microphone hole is located at the top alongside a 3.5 mm jack. The volume rocker and the power button are placed side by side but with ample space in between in the right hand side.
In the white model, the power button is painted black that further accentuates its looks.
The Honor 4X has fairly big 5.5 inch display that dominates the front panel. Under the display there are three touch buttons while above the screen lies a speaker grill, 5 megapixel front camera, Proximity Sensor and an indicator.
The display has superb brightness and you won’t have any issues while using it outdoors. Besides, with high definition resolution and smooth touch response, the Honor 4X definitely looks quite good on paper.
Overall, I liked the overall appearance and finishing of Huawei Honor 4X.
Display
The Honor 4X has a 5.5 inch display. The screen has got high definition resolution which means its display has got 267 ppi Pixel density which is decent but not something to boast about. Many of its competitors today boast full high definition resolution or higher pixel density. But having said that I would also like to emphasise that the HD resolution is pretty good and you wouldn’t feel any pinch while playing high end games or watching movies.
The display however is a fingerprint magnet and prone to scratches. But with tempered glasses and screen protectors readily available in the market, these issues don’t seem to bother anyone these days.
The Honor 4X’s display too has enough brightness for both outdoors and indoors. However, I found the touch response a bit out of sync. Many a times, our touch inputs failed to initiate a response which could be due to the lags and not the screen.
Interface
The smartphone comes with Android 4.4.4 KitKat operating system out of the box and has a customised interface made by Huawei itself- Emotion 3.0 UI. The interface has no App drawer, so everything is on the home page itself. It has one handed option which is restricted to the calling app only – in this mode, the dialler can be placed either towards the right or left as per a user’s preference. There is a standard and simple home screen styles – in the later few basic apps (calling, messaging) are visible in big fonts. Overall, the interface is quite simple and nice but one annoying aspect of its UI is the EMUI lock screen that shows information in Chinese and not English or any other Indian languages.
Performance
The Huawei Honor 4X has the Snapdragon 410 Chipset comprising of a 64 bit quad core processor that has a maximum clock speed of 1.2 GHz, and Adreno 306 graphics processor and 2 GB RAM. This combination is sufficient for daily tasks. However, the phone isn’t capable of handing high end games and during multitasking involving 6-7 apps, it shows some lags.
As far as battery back up is concerned, the Huawei Honor 4X is decent but not what we had expected from a phone with a huge 3000 mAh Li-Po battery. As per Huawei, the Honor 4X offers 15 hours of 3G talktime but during out tests, it offered around 10 hours.
In real life situation, when I used two SIM cards, with auto brightness, the phone lost first 40-50 per cent power very quickly but after that the rate of power consumption gets really slow. Thankfully, there is ultra, smart and normal battery modes. The Ultra mode really very helpful in conserving power and comes to the rescue when you are in no situation to charge the phone. So if you are a heavy data user or use phone’s camera a lot, then a good power bank is mandatory with Honor 4X.
Camera
The Honor 4X has a 13 megapixel rear Autofocus camera and a 5 megapixel front fixed focus camera. The camera app is quite simple. As far as the quality goes, the rear camera captures plenty of details as well as colours. Even with full zoom, it offers manageable pictures.
We have published few camera samples which you can check out here.
Connectivity and Storage
This is definitely the USP of the Huawei Honor 4X. It offers two micro SD card slots both of which are capable of holding 4G SIM cards. Besides, it has WiFi, Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, WiFi Hotspot, micro USB port, and GPS.
The Huawei Honor 4X has got decent 8 GB of inbuilt storage of which 4.05 GB is available for users. Officially, the expandable storage slot can handle 32 GB micro SD card slots but in our case, it managed to hold a 64 GB card. It doesn’t accept though external storage devices.