I recently got Honor Holly 2 Plus from Huawei PR team to do a review & thought of posting it all over the social media but I went busy with other stuff. Anyhow, this is going to be a short & a clear cut review on Honor Holly 2 Plus. I usually take more than 3 weeks to test the device overall & write an in-depth review about it, but for the first time, I am bringing the Honor Holly 2 Plus review exactly in 2 weeks. You may be wondering why? Well, I want to speed up things you know..!
Anyhow, let me talk more about this budget phone & less about what & how I do! Now there are many smartphones which come under 10K, but most of them are more money(budget) oriented than performance oriented. I mean they come under 10K and have high-end features, but when it comes to performance, the smartphones won’t meet your expectations. Don’t worry! There are few other smartphones under 10K which also give preference to performance along with the price-point. Let us see if Honor Holly 2 Plus is one of them or not. Before wasting any of your time, let me take you straight to the Honor Holly 2 Plus review.
Huawei Honor Holly 2 Plus Review:
Just like my other reviews, I’ve decided to follow the same writing style in doing the current review too, so I will start from the basic design.
Design:
Though there are 3 variants, I really liked the white one when it was released in Feb – 2016. Luckily, I received the same white variant for the review. The honor holly 2 Plus looks stunning with its metal rim around its plastic body. The phone is basically a 5′ HD display with the onscreen keys. There are literally no physical buttons on the bottom strip which makes it very comfortable while using the phone in landscape mode. On the front side, you can find notification LED, front-facing camera (no flash) & an earpiece whereas on the back, you can find mic & the rear camera with a flash. Below to that, you can find the ‘honor’ logo embedded on it. Basically, the back has a texture pattern which makes it not so slippery while holding it. On the top, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack while on the bottom you can find the USB port with 2 speaker grills on either side. Well, the one on the left side will work as speaker while the other one was given for the design purpose. You can find the volume rocker & the power key on the right side of the phone while the left side is blank. For inserting SIMs & microSD card, you need to open the back cover and yeah, the battery is nonremovable (well, most of the phones are following this trend now)
Maybe because of a high battery, I can feel the phone as bit-weight. Besides, I feel very comfortable holding it & using even on the go. I haven’t tried drop-test or similar tests as the phone’s build is of plastic & I don’t want to take any risks.
Display:
As already mentioned, the display is just HD, you may feel discomfort while using it under the Sun. Even, the auto-brightness doesn’t light up the screen as bright that makes the phone watch it under the sun. I manually increased the brightness to make the screen viewable & it was such a hefty task for me to do it manually every time whenever I go outside. The PPI is too low & is around 296 pixels. Now you may be wondering how good the display is with such low PPI? Well, it’s not that bad. As far as I tested, the 720P display is perfectly alright playing YouTube videos in 720P. Well, to be honest, there was some pixel loss, but overall, the display is good for the budget the phone is offered.
Except proximity & accelerometer, literally there are no other sensors embedded in this phone. Though there’s no fingerprint sensor, still you can see your fingerprints on the phone. I mean, on the screen! I guess you know what I mean right? The absence of an oleophobic coating on the screen makes the display prone to dust & fingerprints. So care should be taken while touching the display. I say, you cannot place your keys in the same pocket where your phone is, as the display has no scratch-resistant. Well, Huawei is offering 1-month replacement warranty for malfunction in displays, if you are lucky enough you may avail this in the case of any problems with the display.
Camera:
Honor Holly 2 Plus sports a 13MP camera on the rear side whereas the front-facing camera is of 5MP. The phone comes with 3 basic modes – HDR, normal & Panorama. Besides, you can also find a few filters which you can apply while taking pictures. You can easily adjust the brightness & color exposure while taking the shot (beauty mode). There’s a special feature called audio note, by enabling it you can just say cheese to snap the shot. Along with that, you can also find smile detection which automatically takes the shot when it detects the smile on your face.
There’s one more special feature called ultra snapshot. By enabling this feature, you can take a fast snapshot by double pressing the volume down key. This will surely help in times of emergency. In the video mode, you can find the same features like in the picture mode.
To be clear, image stabilization is optimum and the touch focus is very fast. You can check out some of the shots I captured at the Forum mall. Behold to see some Captain America: Civil war movie stuff!
Performance:
Honor Holly 2 Plus comes with a 1.3GHz quad-core processor (64 bit Mediatek MT6735P chipset) and Mali-T720MP2 for GPU. It runs on Android v5.1.1(Lollipop) and is customized based on EMUI 3.1. The home screen has different transition effects & you can find all the apps on the home screen itself. Thanks to the Huawei for completely optimizing the OS and making it as simple as possible. When the phone is in idle, you can find a free RAM of around 1GB while on the use, it goes up to 500MB free memory. I see some lag during multitasking, but in general use, the phone doesn’t lag even a bit. One good thing is I haven’t experienced any heating issue while using the phone which is a big advantage in saving the battery too.
I used AnTuTu benchmark & GeekBench 3.0 to test the performance. Here you can find the test results & full screenshots.
Honor Holly 2 Plus AnTuTu Benchmark Scores
Honor Holly 2 Plus – GeekBench 3.0 Scores
In short, the scores are not up to the mark. Coming to the gaming, as the phone showed low scores in my testing, I have only installed Real Racing 3 which played perfectly. I have not dared to install a high-end game as I know what happens. One serious issue I faced is I was not able to use the ‘Google Now’ (voice commands) as it goes off by itself when I pressed it. I have updated the app but the issue still exists. Besides, the other Google apps worked perfectly. For a while, I can access the Google Now and can see the personalized timeline, but whenever I press the mic button (voice command), the app shuts down itself.
Battery Life:
I fell in love with the phone’s battery! As a Galaxy S4 owner, I know the typical problems faced by a Samsung user & I have seen battery issues on many other phones including the so called Flagship Killer – OnePlus 2. It’s not just the high capacity battery, but also the optimization of the phone’s software makes a big change in the battery life. Coming to the Honor Holly 2 Plus, the phone boasts a Li-Po 4000 mAh non-removable battery. With the daily usage, the phone can give an outstanding battery life of 2 days whereas continuous browsing, watching videos (both online & offline) can make it less that is up to 14 hours (from 100%).
Here is the battery test using the GeekBench application.
This completes the Honor Holly 2 Plus review in short. Before making any conclusion on this budget phone, let me tell what are the Pros & Cons based on the available features.
Pros & Cons:
Pros:
- No Heating Issue
- Good Battery Backup
- Affordable & the best price tag
Cons:
- Lags while multitasking
- Poor performance
- No scratch resistance to the display
Conclusion:
What else you need in a phone? A good battery backup, an HD display and a good camera for a perfect price tag. If this is what you are looking for a phone that comes under 10K, then you can just go ahead and buy Honor Holly 2 Plus.
