Huawei Honor Holly review

Huawei-owned Honor is hoping the Holly can shake up the entry-level smartphone market. At the moment, the Holly costs just £110 SIM-free, putting it right in the middle of our current budget favourites, the £145 2nd Gen Motorola Moto G and its cheaper £90 cousin, the Moto E. However, it could potentially trump both phones on price when it launches at the end of February.

Honor has said that the more people who register their interest for the phone in advance, the lower the final price will be. We don’t think it will end up going much below £110, though, as it was barely a quarter of its way toward its first £100 milestone at the time of writing. Still, even if it does remain at £110, it looks impressive on paper: a 5in 1,280x720 resolution display, generous 16GB of storage and 8-megapixel camera give the Moto G and Moto E a collective run for their money.

Admittedly, the Holly doesn't look half as attractive as either of Motorola's budget handsets. The glossy chassis attracts no end of smeary fingerprints and the removable back panel flexes slightly under pressure. Still, the curved edges make it comfortable to hold and we had no problems using the handset with one hand.

The Holly's dedicated buttons also leave more room for your apps on its 5in 1,280x720 display. As it's the same size as the Moto G's screen, text, icons and images will look equally sharp on both handsets. The Holly's screen is significantly brighter than the Moto G, though, as our colour calibrator measured a peak brightness of 435.01cd/m2 compared to the Moto G's 350.70cd/m2. This made it much easier to read long articles when browsing the web, as the black text stood out much more clearly against the white background. A higher brightness should also help when using the phone outside in bright sunshine, even if that’s rarely an issue here in the UK.

Colour accuracy isn't the Holly's strong point, though, as our colour calibrator showed it was only displaying 80.1% of the sRGB colour gamut. This isn't great, even by budget phone standards, as we'd normally expect a score of at least 90% regardless of price. Instead, nearly all the main primary colour groups fell short of the sRGB gamut boundaries, leaving images looking very yellow and off colour as a result. It makes the Moto G's screen look quite cool by comparison, but the Moto G's 87.2% sRGB gamut coverage was much more evenly spread.

The Holly is powered by a quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582 processor and 1GB of RAM, which is the same set of components inside the Prestigio Mulitphone Duo 5550 (review soon). This is fine for swiping through Huawei's custom Emotion UI skin, which sits on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, but the Moto G's Snapdragon 400 chip felt more responsive overall, producing snappier menu animations and quicker app loading times.

It's also worth noting that Huawei's Emotion UI doesn't have an app tray, so all your app icons spread out across the nine main home screens. This can often make the phone feel a little cluttered on top of its general sluggishness, but at least the respective icons now look a lot cleaner and more modern than previous Emotion interfaces.

BENCHMARKS

The Holly also lagged behind the Moto G in our PCMark benchmarks, which tests web browsing, document and photo editing, and video playback. Whereas the Moto G scored an impressive 2,850 overall, the Holly managed just 1,867. The Holly performed particularly poorly in the video playback and document editing sections of the test, so both work and play will take longer to load and manage than rival smartphones. 

Graphics performance was a big let-down. The Holly could only manage an average of 16.8fps (or a score of 3,154) in our 3DMark Ice Storm test and a stuttering 13.4fps (or 2,083) in Ice Storm Extreme, so it may struggle with more demanding 3D games. These scores put it more on par with the Moto E, but at least the Moto E wass still capable of running our Epic Citadel test at Ultra High quality. The Holly, meanwhile, only lets you choose High quality, so some games will never look their best. The Holly produced a highly respectable 46.5fps at its native resolution on High quality, however, so it should still be able to handle more casual games at perfectly acceptable speeds.

CAMERA

We were very pleased with the quality of the Holly’s 8-megapixel photos, as colours looked rich and natural despite the overcast weather conditions and the sky was exposed very accurately. There was a little too much noise in a couple of our photos, but it was a fairly minor complaint overall. Combine this with the 16GB of storage, which is double what you get in the Moto G, and you should have plenty of room for photos. 

We wouldn't recommend trying to use the Holly's HDR mode, though, as several shots ended up exceedingly blurry as it stitched both exposures together. Like the Prestigio, the Holly doesn't cater well for natural hand-shake, so you'll have to keep the phone dead still to get a decent shot.

^ We found that many of the Holly's HDR photos ended up looking blurry, here's one of the better ones, but the camera overall is pretty impressive

Battery life is decent, but not spectacular, as the 2,000mAh battery lasted just 7h 59m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to 170cd/m2. This should still get you through the day, but we were hoping for a little more, especially since the Moto G lasted almost another two hours under the same conditions.

CONCLUSION

In this sense, the Moto G comes out on top in almost every respect, but it does cost (at least for now) another £35 SIM-free and doesn't have as much internal storage. This might be enough to sway some users, but it's worth bearing in mind that you won't be getting an upgrade to Android 5.0 with the Holly, whereas you will with the Moto G. We might be willing to bump it up another star if the Holly's price does end up falling below £100, as that would make it a much better value handset than either the Moto G or the Moto E, but for now, the Motorola Moto G remains our budget handset of choice. If you really need something more powerful then check out our reguarly-updated Best Smartphones article.