Of late, Honor brand is getting very good traction in the Indian market and is getting huge response. All this credit goes to good design and very good performance of Honor devices. Huawei has also come in global limelight by launching Nexus 6P smartphone in association with Google and customers have reposed faith in their products. We are witnessing the making of great brand in smartphone arena and that day is not far off when brand Honor or other brand of Huawei will be top on the chart.
Huawei has brought two smartphones in India last month -Honor Holly 2 Plus, which was launched in China last year as Enjoy 5. The other smartphone launched by Huawei is Honor 5x. We have the opportunity to get Honor Holly Plus 2 for review purpose.
Look
The Honor Holly 2 Plus is made of very high quality plastic material and does not look like any ordinary device. To make it look elegant and premium, an aluminium rim has been given between the plastic cover and the front panel. This phone has removable polycarbonate cover at the back with a crisscross pattern which again gives it different and appealing look. Under the cover, there are two SIM slots and one slot is for inserting microSD card. It also houses a non-removable battery. Power and volume rockers are placed on the right hand side and left hand side is plain and there are no buttons on this side.
On the front panel of the handset, their is 5 inch HD display, 5MP camera on the top with ambient light and proximity sensor. The three Android buttons are on the screen which will not be visible when the screen is off. The microUSB port as usual is given at the bottom flanked by two speaker grilles.The actual grilles is on the left side and one on the right has been given for maintaining symmetry only.
The Honor Holly 2 Plus is compact and light weight device and is ideally suitable for single hand use. Besides, it looks good to carry.
Display
This phone has a 5 inch HD (720×1280 pixel) IPS display with pixel desnsity of 293ppi and to our utter surprise, it has very good readability even in direct sunlight where even flagship devices with higher resolution struggle a lot. Othewise, the screen reproduces bright and vibrant colors. While browsing various sites, we observed that the graphics look quite good and text is crisp and easy to read. The viewing angles of the screen are upto the mark and in this price range, the display performs beyond its capability.
Performance
Despite a budget phone, the Honor Holly 2 Plus does not let you down. It has been powered with a 64-bit, 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6735P processor with integrated Mali-T720 graphics combined with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 16GB of internal storage and the users get around 9.28GB space for usage for different apps and other work. Moreover, you can extend the internal storage upto 128GB with the support of micrroSD card. We have used this phone extensively for calling, emails, social networking sites and also played few games on it. In our usage, we did not face any stutter and lag. We noticed a little hiccup when this phone was used for loger duration for heavy resourceful games and this is not an alarming issue as in this range, we were expecting more trouble but fortunately, it defied all our doubts and worked like a breeze as far as multitsking, switching between the apss and other routine operations were concerned.
This phone supports 4G LTE Indian networks and we observed that it catches 4G signals quite well wherever it is available and quality of calling and receiving calls is very good.
Battery
The USP of this phone is its massive 4000mAh battery which can easily last upto two days depending upon the usage. As mentioned earlier, we have extensively used the phone and the battery lasted easily for almost one and half day i.e for more than 12 hours, which is quite good performance. This battery comes with fast charging and you can use this battery to charge other devices also. In other words, this battery can be used as a power bank also.
Camera
As it has become a tradition to fit the budget phone with 13MP rear and 5MP front cameras, this phone also has been provided with a 13 megapixel rear camera with a f/2.0 aperture with single LED flash and a 5 megapixel front-facing camera. The similarty between the camera of this phone and other phones end here only. The camera of this phone reproduces very sharp results especially the images clicked in good light. The clicked images have depth and detils and the color reproduction is quite natural. Even in less light, the clicked photos turn out well and in total darkness and in fading light, the results are not as good. The front camera is quite ok for clicking selfies for sharing on social media. The cameras of this phone come with various modes such as as Panorama, HDR,Watermark, Audio note, Beauty mode and also come with several photo filters.
Images clicked in daylight:
Images clicked in the night:
Software
The Honor Holly 2 Plus runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop OS and the EMUI 3.1 custom skin on top. Fortunately, the skinning does not bring with it bloatwares and it is simple and easy to operate. The default screen comes with different wallpapers which change each time you unlock the screen. You have the option to choose one of the four themes provided as default. It comes with very useful apps such as BackUp app for backing up your app and personal data, Phone Manager to enable you to control your phone with options of storage cleaner, power saving, app lock and do not disturb feature etc.
To sum up, Honor Holly Plus 2 has all the necessary ingredients to fit in budget segment. It passses all the test of design, performance and camera quality is decent in this price range. The most important and highlight of this phone is its huge battery which will keep going for almost two days. At its price of Rs. 8,499, this is a recommendable phone and its close competitor can be Coolpad Note 3 which has fingerprint scanner, display of 5.5 inches and 3GB RAM, but battery is not as strong as of Holly 2 Plus.
