Honor 4X review — The 4G smartphone won’t disappoint you!

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei, under its Honor segment, has launched an impressive mid-budget smartphone, Honor 4X, in India. As compared to the other exorbitantly priced smartphones in the market, the Honor 4X is packed with features at a decent price tag and is quite a deal to steal.

Honor has also launched ‘Honor 6 Plus’ along with the 4X, which is a high-end smartphone. We had a chance for a hand-on experience with the Honor 4X, and here is what we drew out of the smartphone’s experience.

The Honor 4X, sports a plastic textured chassis. In spite of the material of the built, the phone feels quite sturdy and tough. The phone feels good to hold and touch, but it’s a tad bit inconvenient to use with one hand. The Honor 4X is 8.7mm thick and weighs 165g.

The Honor 4X sports a 5.5-inch IPS LCD display with a 720 x 1280 pixel resolution. The front panel sports an earpiece and a 5MP front camera, along with a sensor, towards the top, while bottom of features the menu and settings function touch-buttons. The display of the Honor 4X is pretty glossy and it easily attracts fingerprints and smudges.

On its right edge, the smartphone features the volume rocker and the power button, while the microphone, charging port and speakers rest at the bottom edge. The audio jack is placed on the top. At the rear panel, the Honor 4X sports a 13MP camera with an LED flash and the Honor logo is chiselled just beneath it.

Although the Honor 4X scores decently well when it comes to ergonomics, we felt that the large body would be a bit of an issue for those with small hands.

Under the hood, the Honor 4X is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset, which comprises of a four-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz and 2GB of RAM. It embraces an internal storage of 8GB, which is expandable up to 32GB using a microSD card. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot, 4G, a Micro USB 2.0, Bluetooth v4.0 and GPS. The Honor 4X is fuelled with a Li-Po 3,000 mAh battery, which lasts for more than 24 hours. However, the battery’s runtime will completely depend on the kind of usage on the smartphone.

The Honor 4X is powered by an Android KitKat 4.4.4 operating system with a flavour of Honor’s customised user interface. The smartphone’s UI, however, resembles a lot to Xiaomi’s MIUI, ween on their Mi handsets and tablets. The 4X’s user interface is pretty smooth and fluid, though the touch and transitions sometimes lack responsiveness. Altogether, the Honor 4X offers a decent performance.

The display of the smartphone has a great viewing angle too, and the display’s legibility in bright sunlight is pretty good—clear enough to read even in bright sunlight.

As mentioned earlier, the Honor 4X sports a single speaker at the bottom of the device. The speaker is loud, audible, and creates a decent sound with sufficient bass levels. The smartphone’s audio is fit for casual audio or video entertainment. Unfortunately, the smartphone does not come along with a pair of earphones, forcing you to invest a little more on a compatible headset.

Moving to the camera, which is undoubtedly the USP of the smartphone, the 4X sports a 2.5+ SONY-OV second-generation BSI 13MP primary camera and a 5MP front-facing camera. The pictures taken by the Honor 4X are modestly sharp and bright, with a good balance of colours and contrast. The quality of the zoomed-in shots is quite decent as well, but is not recommended as they are digital zoom images. The front camera caters to the selfie addicts, which auto detects portraits and corrects skin flaws and blemishes. The front camera, by default, snaps a picture when you smile at it. Altogether the camera of the Honor 4X is quite stately.

Below are a few shots taken from the rear camera. You can click to view/download the images and view them at full resolution in order to judge the performance of the camera.

Wrapping up the review, even at the end of the assessment of the Honor 4X, we would stick by our word and say that this smartphone is quite a steal. Priced at Rs 10,499 we are convinced that with its performance, camera and the usability, the Honor 4X would not disappoint its user. The device will be available from March 30 with registrations begining on Flipkart starting March 24, 2015. Huawei has also launched the Honor 6 Plus, which is priced at Rs 26,499 and will be available in April.