Huawei tries something new, relaunches the Honor 6 smartphone without the Huawei name

By Andy Boxall October 29, 2014

Huawei has re-announced the Honor 6 smartphone, and is using it to spearhead a new campaign to break into the European market. The phone, originally launched back in June, will be sold through a few online retailers, and the hihonor.com online store, which is operated by Huawei. The company is relegating its own name to the background, and seems to be promoting the Honor brand instead.

It’s not the first time Huawei has considered altering its name to improve awareness in international markets. Rival Chinese brand ZTE has also toyed with the same idea using its Nubia brand name. While the Huawei name has become better known over the past year, it still doesn’t have the same recognition as Samsung, LG, or HTC. That doesn’t mean Honor will save it though, as any prospective buyers in the UK will look at the name and wonder why someone has spelled “Honour” incorrectly.

Back to the phone. The Honor 6 doesn’t have a 6-inch display, as the name suggests, but a 5-inch panel with a 1080p resolution. One of Huawei’s own 1.3GHz, octa-core Kirin 920 chips powers the device, and it drives Android 4.4 with the Emotion UI over the top. There’s an impressive 3GB of RAM to assist the processor, and the phone comes with 16GB of internal memory, plus a MicroSD card expansion slot.

A 13-megapixel camera sits on the rear, and a 5-megapixel selfie cam is fitted above the screen. Both have the ability to shoot panoramic photos. The phone’s chassis is very slim at 6.5mm, and the whole device weighs 135 grams, making it very compact for the size of the screen. Huawei claims it has a 75.7 percent screen-to-body ratio, meaning the bezels around the screen are relatively slim. For comparison, this slightly improves on the similarly sized LG G3 Beat’s 74.1 percent ratio.

Huawei has priced the Honor 6 very competitively. It’s £250 (that’s about $400) without a contract through Amazon in the UK, and should cost around 270 euros throughout Europe. Huawei hasn’t launched the Honor 6 in America, but it has tested a similar strategy with the Ascend Mate 2.

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Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

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