Honor, the Huawei-owned company behind the Honor 6, has today announced that its brand new Holly smartphone will be coming to the UK on the 23rd February. However, rather than give a set price for its new budget handset, Honor will be letting customers decide how much they want to pay in the run up to the phone's launch.
That doesn't mean you can only say you'll pay £1 for the Honor Holly, though, as the phone's final price will actually be based on the number of people who register their interest for the phone in advance on Honor's website from tomorrow onwards (5th February). Honor told Expert Reviews that the starting price will begin at around £110, but the more people who register for the phone, the lower the final price will be - and with Honor including the whole of Europe in its price race, that could be very low indeed.
Even if the price stayed at £110, though, the Honor Holly has a pretty impressive specification for such a cheap handset. It has a 5in 1,280x720 IPS display, giving it a pixel density of 294 pixels-per-inch, a quad-core 1.3GHz Mediatek MT6582 processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera, 16GB of storage that can be expanded by microSD card up to 32GB and a 2,000mAh battery.
That's almost identical to, if not slightly better than Motorola's £145 2nd Gen Moto G, our current reigning champion of budget smartphones. While we've yet to put the Honor Holly through its paces, our initial impressions of the handsets are promising, as there's plenty here to give Motorola cause for concern.
Admittedly, the Honor Holly's glossy plastic chassis doesn't look quite as desirable as the Moto G, not least because it picks up hundreds of fingerprints, but it's certainly well built and we couldn't see any signs of flex in the rear panel. Honor has also confirmed to us that the Holly will have interchangeable back covers (again, much like the Moto G), so you'll be able to switch them out whenever you like if you don't like the default white or black models.
Its rounded corners are comfortable to hold, too, and its large 5in screen looked bright and easy to read thanks to the wide viewing angles of its IPS panel. Our initial SunSpider JavaScript scores were also on par with the Moto G, as the Holly scored 1,400ms in Chrome and 1,316ms in its default browser. Android 4.4.2 certainly seemed quick and responsive when browsing through the menus, but we were disappointed to hear that the Holly would be missing out on an update to Android 5.0 Lollipop.
This is a shame, but Android 4.4.2 is still a perfectly decent operating system. However, like the Honor 6, the Holly will be running Huawei's Emotion UI, so all your apps will have to live on the main home screens rather than in the app tray. We're not the biggest fans of the Emotion UI, but at least Huawei's current interface looks a lot cleaner and more modern than previous iterations.
Operating system niggles aside, the Honor Holly could potentially be the next best budget smartphone around and we'll be particularly interested to see how low the price goes comes launch day. As soon as we have confirmation of the final price, we'll bring you our final verdict in our full review.