After the Honor 6 threw out the rulebook for flagship smartphones, the Huawei-owned Honor now hopes its new Holly handset can do the same thing for budget phones. When we first reviewed the phone, the Holly cost £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 2014 Moto E.
Now, the Holly's price matches the old Moto E at £90 SIM-free, making it one of the best bargains we've seen this year. Motorola's since launched a new 4G version of the Moto E (the 2nd Gen Moto E 2015), but this is currently £109 SIM-free and has a smaller 4.5in 960x540 resolution display. The Honor Holly, on the other hand, is more of a direct competitor to the Moto G, as it has a larger 5in 1,280x720 resolution display, a generous 16GB of storage and 8-megapixel camera, giving both Motorola handsets 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. 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.
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 another £70 SIM-free and doesn't have as much internal storage. This alone will be more enough to sway some users in the Holly's favour, 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.
This wouldn't be so bad if the Holly ran a purer form of Android 4.4, but you'll also have to put up with Huawei's Emotion UI as well. We've never been big fans of the Emotion UI, so it falls just short of winning a Best Buy award, but at £75, there's no denying it's still a pretty good bargain.
The Motorola Moto G is still our number one budget handset of choice, as we think the benefits it brings with its faster performance, longer lasting battery and Android 5.0 is worth the extra expense, but if you're looking to keep costs down, then the Honor Holly is a good alternative. However, if you're after a cheap 4G handset, the new Moto E (2015) is much better value, as this has an even better battery life and faster performance, making it our top pick for anyone looking to spend under £110.
| Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582 |
| RAM | 1GB |
| Screen size | 5in |
| Screen resolution | 1,280x720 |
| Screen type | LCD |
| Front camera | 2-megapixels |
| Rear camera | 8-megapixels |
| Flash | LED |
| GPS | Yes |
| Compass | Yes |
| Storage | 16GB |
| Memory card slot (supplied) | microSD |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11n |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.0 |
| NFC | No |
| Wireless data | 3G |
| Size | 142x72x9.4mm |
| Weight | 156g |
| Features | |
| Operating system | Android 4.4.2 |
| Battery size | 2,000mAh |
| Buying information | |
| Warranty | One-year RTB |
| Price SIM-free (inc VAT) | £110 |
| Price on contract (inc VAT) | N/A |
| Prepay price (inc VAT) | N/A |
| SIM-free supplier | www.hihonor.com |
| Contract/prepay supplier | N/A |
| Details | www.hihonor.com |
| Part code | HOL-U19 |
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