Honor Holly – Hands-on with the Moto G 2 rival
If you don’t know who Honor is, it’s a spin-off company from Huawei. While the Chinese smartphone giant focuses on taking on the likes of the Galaxy S5, the HTC One M8 and the iPhone 6, Honor is aiming to offer the best phones at the more affordable end of the market.
As our review of the Honor 6 proved, this is not a company that does cheap and nasty. With the Honor Holly, a phone that's been available under the Huawei Honor brand in China, the 5-inch Android phone with a 720p HD screen and dual SIM card support is coming to the UK.
SEE ALSO: Best cheap phones to buy 2015 
Those key features give it a similar specs outlay to the second generation Moto G. It doesn’t run on pure Android like the Moto phone or support 4G LTE like the Motorola phone, but there’s one big difference here and that’s price. While Honor is not confirming UK prices just yet, it has said it will be around £110 or 139 Euros and if you pre-register, you can get it for less than that.
For that money, you are getting a whole lot The phone’s plastic body is no surprise here but it certainly gives it a stature similar to the Moto G 2 and it even has a slightly curved back albeit with a glossy finish. The back plate is removable as well, which hides away the removable battery, micro SD card slot to expand the 16GB onboard storage and dual SIM card slots with a dedicated management system found inside the settings section.
The 5-inch 720p IPS HD display promises an impressive 294 PPI pixel density, which is exactly the same as the second gen Moto G. It 's vibrant and bright and while colours look a little saturated, this is impressive display specs for a phone that’s going to be under £100.
The Honor Holly is running on Android 4.4 KitKat, so sadly not Android Lollipop 5.0 just yet, with Honor's EMUI 3.0 overlaid on top. It's basically the Emotion UI you get on Huawei phones and still feels like one of the more childish approaches to pure Android, There's a 1.3GHZ quad-core Mediatek MT6582 processor on board and 1GB of RAM powering things so swiping through the UI is smooth with no signs of lag.
Phones this cheap usually take a hit in the camera department, so that’s why it’s surprising that the Holly packs an 8-megapixel BSI main camera with a f.2.0 lens and a 2-megapixel camera up front. For filming, you can also shoot at Full HD 1080p. Again, that's some impressive specs.
In the battery department, there’s a 2,000mAh removable battery, which is slightly smaller than the 2,070mAh one inside the Moto G 2, so we expect you can get a day’s use of it, although, there’s no telling what that 5-inch LCD display is going to do to its ability to make it beyond the one day barrier.
First impressions
I can’t help but be impressed with the Honor Holly. It has all the same qualities of our favourite cheap phone, the Moto G 2 and is £30-£40 less. If you compare it to what that amount of money can currently get you, there’s not much competition. The Emotion UI-influenced approach to Android is still needs some work and it's disappointing not to see Lollipop in tow or 4G support.
Aside from that, this could be one of the top cheap phones to look out for this year.
