Honor X6a
Honor X6a Review: A minimalist budget-friendly phone with standard features
The journey of Honor as a smartphone brand started with their entry into the budget-friendly and mid-range smartphone market. Honor launched the X6a on 28th July 2023 in India. The Honor X6a comes as an update over last year’s Honor X6. Let’s have a detailed look into it.
Key Specifications of Honor X6a
Design and Build Quality
The design of the Honor X6a is quite minimal. The device has a plastic frame and back with a glass front. The sensors protrude from the back panel. The frosted finish on the Cyan Lake variant refracts light which gives the smartphone its unique look. Those looking for an even more minimal option, the Midnight Black can be an option with a matte black finish.
Dimension-wise, the X6a comes in at 163.32 x 75.07 x 8.35 mm with 188 g of weight. The smartphone comes with standard ports and button choices including a headphone jack and a dedicated micro SDXC slot. The power button on the X6a doubles as the fingerprint scanner. The front of the device has a water-drop notch display with a sizable chin at the bottom. Being an ultra-budget smartphone, the large chin isn’t entirely unfounded.
Overall the flat style design with frosted finish adds a new dimension to the X6a.
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The Display
The display on the Honor X6a is a 6.56-inch TFT LCD panel with HD+ resolution. The panel has a 720 x 1612 pixel layout with 260 ppi. However, the most distinctive feature of the display is the 90 Hz refresh rate. It’s great to see even ultra-budget smartphones are offering faster refresh rate displays.
The panel also supports up to 16.7 M colors. It has a slightly different aspect ratio at 20.15:9. It can be due to the large chin at the bottom which brings the screen-to-body ratio to around 83%. The multi-touch gesture support can accommodate up to 10 touch points at the same time.
Speaking of usability, the display looked great for a budget smartphone. The default color was a bit on the warm side but that can be easily calibrated from the settings. For anyone coming from a 60 Hz panel, the faster refresh rate would be easily noticeable.
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The Camera
There is a triple camera setup on the X6a even though there are 4 distinct sensor housings on the back. One of the sensor spaces actually houses the flashlight which helps to bring that square symmetrical look at the back.
The main camera is a 50 MP f/1.8 wide-angle sensor with PDAF. The complementing camera modules are a 2 MP f/2.4 macro and a 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor. In effect, the X6a is carried mostly by the main camera as the macro and depth sensors aren’t very useful in any way.
Being a budget smartphone, the camera on the X6a was quite impressive. The main camera was able to capture some great shots in daylight conditions. One of the key issues with budget-friendly smartphone cameras is the loss of dynamic range. However, the X6a did a good enough job of preserving it throughout every shot. The portrait shots also came out pretty well. There were slight edge detection issues at times which will hopefully be solved with a software update.
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11 months ago