Honor 6x has enough to dethrone the Redmi Note 4 & Cool1 Dual

A mid-range smartphone these days has enough to challenge the high-end smartphones of some well-known brands. To be fair, every brand has been doing so well with their mid -range smartphone range, that you can keep away from a much pricier flagship.

The smartphone market is dominated by options, so many that it has become necessary for mobile manufacturers to highlight a key USP to attract customers. This makes it easy for the consumer to choose from the plethora of options. But, why can’t one dream of having everything in a single device, and get it for a competitive price? Of course, that is possible. One brand that is making it hard for the likes of Apple and Samsung is Huawei. By offering ‘feature rich’ products at the right price.

The latest phone from the company that is entering the hefty and ever-active mid-range smartphone market of India is the Swagphone Honor 6X. While some may say, the Honor 6X is going to face an uphill battle, it actually the other way around. The Honor 6X is a complete a package that can compete with ease against the likes of Xiaomi and Coolpad devices. We mention the latter two because the year 2016 had some good phones from both the brands in the mid-range category.

Let’s compare the three phones – Honor 6x, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, and the Coolpad Cool 1 Dual head to head:

Build, design and exterior

Interestingly, while several companies are still in the traditional mood of having smartphones with a polycarbonate body and offer metal back on only high-end variants, all the three brands that we are talking about here are giving a solid metal unibody design. The phones are almost identical in terms of thickness, and they have a curvy back towards the edges and corners. Now, the only noticeable difference here is that the Honor 6x is a bit lighter than the other two phones in comparison.

Internal Hardware

What drives the phone and its experience is the processor that powers it. While the interface equally contributes to the experience, it isn’t anything without a proper chipset under the hood. The Coolpad Cool1 Dual and Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 have Snapdragon processors powering them, but on the other side, the Honor 6X is powered by Huawei’s homegrown Kirin chipsets that have proven to offer a flawless performance.

Even if the Snapdragon 652 in Cool1 Dual offers a neat performance, the chip is associated with some heating issues on heavy usage. The Snapdragon 625 chip given in the Redmi Note 4 is relatively newer and has no complaints thus far, but the Kirin 655 octa-core processor clocking at 2.1GHz has been great in both, heavy usage and gaming.

The Cool1 Dual lacks a MicroSD card slot, thus restricting the user to the limited storage, while the Swagphone Honor 6X and Redmi Note 4 support up to 128GB microSD card.

Camera – the major factor!

Dual cameras have recently become a feature in premium flagship offerings. But, Honor had introduced this concept in their Honor 6 Plus way back in 2015, and continues with the dual-camera setup in the Honor 6X. Let’s first talk about each camera before talking about the winner among them.

Honor 6x – A dual-lens camera system having a 12-megapixel RGB sensor and a 2-megapixel monochrome sensor does a lot more than just taking a good photo. The details recorded, the color accuracy and the highlights are all perfect, thanks to the combination of the two sensors that work seamlessly together. Coming with the 1/2.9″ sensor size and 1.25 µm pixel size, the camera set on the Honor 6X is arguably the best in this category.

Redmi Note 4 – Xiaomi has packed a standard 13-megapixel camera with the F/2.0 aperture and phase detection autofocus. Xiaomi’s camera app offers some good support, but the hardware isn’t worth boasting about or taking advantage of in different conditions.

Cool1 Dual – As the name suggests, the phone has the dual-lens camera system with two 13-megapixel sensors included and they come with F/2.0 aperture and phase detection autofocus. The two lenses work together in bringing some cool bokeh effects, but that is what any dual-lens camera set does.

The fingerprint scanner

Each of the phones here has a sensor located on the back. So, just like how similar the design of the phones is, the location of the sensor too is, but there lies a difference between the functionality.

Honor has got accolades for having more than just the unlocking of the phone using the fingerprint scanner. And again, it isn’t limited to the higher-end phones but is being brought to the pocket-friendly devices. The fingerprint scanner in the Honor 6X offers few extra features, of which two that we absolutely love are, 1. Opening and closing the notification panel with a drag, and 2. Scrolling between the photos in the Gallery app, so you don’t have to reach the screen to swipe and shift between the photos.

What about the other stuff?

Let’s be fair in this aspect. We haven’t used the Redmi Note 4 or Cool1 Dual to see how well does the battery do, but the Honor 6X with its 3340 mAh battery has been able to offer over a day’s use on a single charge. The EMUI 4.1 optimization and cues taken from the Android Marshmallow OS work together in saving battery while the phone is on standby, and that adds to hours of usage.

Final verdict – Who dethrones the other two?

The expectations have gone hugely up in the past few months from a phone that costs a quarter of a flagship, and a mid-range device now has to offer so much. While all the three phones have a lot packed in, the regular use of camera needs a perfect shooter, which is offered by the Honor 6X, and along with that, the software features like the enhancement in the functionality of the fingerprint scanner helps in the cause.

Overall, even if the Redmi Note 4 has a higher battery capacity and if the Coolpad Cool1 Dual comes with a higher megapixel count, those seem like mere numbers when compared with the Honor 6X, which is set to clinch the title!

Note: This is a sponsored post.