A new mobile brand has entered the brutal smartphone arena. Say hello to Honor.
It may seem brave -- or, perhaps, foolish -- to launch a new mobile brand in such a busy market, but it's not really a new brand at all. In fact, Honor is owned and operated by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. Although not a separate company at all, Honor will apparently operate as though it is.
To prove that, here's its first phone. It's called the Honor 6 and it has a full-HD 5-inch display, an octa-core processor, a 13-megapixel camera and cat 6 LTE, which promises speeds of up to 300Mbps if your local networks support it. If that sounds at all familiar, it's because Huawei has already announced the phone, as the Huawei Honor 6, in China back in June. Now that it's going on sale throughout Europe, the only thing that's changed is the branding -- you won't see the Huawei logo on the phone, I'm told.
Still, that's no reason not to be excited about this phone. It has a solid lineup of specs that would rival many top-end phones, but comes with a price tag of only £250, SIM-free on Amazon UK. It ships on 10 November. Honor (or Huawei) hasn't said yet whether the phone will reach the US, but stay tuned for more information. It directly converts to around $400.
Design and display
The Honor 6 is most easily described as a cheaper-looking iPhone 4. It has a black glass front and back, with a metallic strip running around the edge, separating the two panels. That strip is metallic plastic, rather than metal, meaning it doesn't have the same luxurious feel as the iPhone 4.
In fact, it does feel a little on the cheap side. There's a definite plastic feeling to the phone, which isn't helped by that band -- up close it loses any chance of pretending to be metal. It's certainly not among the most luxurious phones around, but it's difficult to mark it down for that, given the price -- premium phones like the HTC One M8, iPhone 6 and Galaxy Alpha all cost hundreds of pounds more than the Honor 6.
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The glass back at least makes the phone look pretty sleek from a distance. At launch, Honor boasted about the back panel's "dazzling, 3D diamond back", which is "inspired by nature". Quite apart from the fact that "inspired by nature" was Samsung's tagline for the Galaxy S3, the back panel just looks plain black -- only under the brightest sunlight at the right angle could I make out the faintest pattern.
With a 5-inch screen stuffed inside, it's not a small phone. It has a fairly narrow bezel though, so the body hasn't needed to stretch out too much to accommodate the large display. It's comfortable to hold in one hand, although you'll realistically need two hands in order to type properly. It has 16GB of built-in storage and there's a microSD card slot on the side to expand that further.
Speaking of the screen, that's a full-HD (1,920x1,080-pixel) panel, which is a very impressive resolution for a phone at this price. It results in a pixel density of 440 pixels per inch, which casually beats the iPhone 6 (326ppi), the Samsung Galaxy Alpha (312ppi) and the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact (319ppi). It even trumps the Galaxy S5's 432ppi screen.
