Honor Bee First Look: Huawei’s Entry-Level Android Smartphone Looks To Rival Micromax Canvas Spark

Those who're searching for a new handset, but have a limited budget may want to consider giving the Honor Bee a try. Like its predecessor, it's one of the affordable Android phones that can be bought for less than Rs. 7,000.

And while the phone's features can't compete with premium smartphones, it still is a good buy for anyone on a tight budget, despite all the sacrifices.

PROS

• Improved UI
• Affordable Price
• 8MP Camera

CONS

• Low resolution display
• Missing 4G LTE

The original Honor Holly was a rare opportunity for Huawei to establish its feet in India's entry-level handset market. The new Honor Bee, which is being presented as the company's first smartphone made for India, just needs to take everything the old one did well and do it better.

We got to spend a few minutes with the Honor Bee at the recently held event in New Delhi. Here are our first impressions.

Huawei Honor Bee First Look: Form Factor, Design, Display and Operating System

Design-wise, the Honor Bee looks almost identical to the original Honor Holly model; it dons the same plastic-made back cover and rounded edges. While the new phone's matte plastic back feels fine, it does feel as solid in the hand. It feels very comfortable in hand, as the Chinese handset maker seems to have found the perfect balance between size and weight.

The display measures 4.5 inches, but only supports 854 X 480 pixels, resolution. The screen isn't quite crisp when compared to the Micromax Canvas Spark, which retails for around Rs. 4,999.

It looked grainy and visibly low-resolution compared with other current phones in its class. Viewing angles were deplorable too.

The Honor Bee runs Android 4.4 KitKat with Huawei's native UI on top. The custom UI is much cleaner and simple experience compared with the heavy UIs that Samsung tend to layer on top of the Android OS.

Huawei Honor Bee First Look: Performance and Connectivity

The Honor Bee uses a 1.2 GHz Spreadtrum SC7731 Cortex-A7 Quad Core Processor CPU, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of on-board storage, which can be further expandable up to 32GB via a microSD card slot.

Real-world performance should be decent enough despite being an aging processor. We ran a video on the YouTube with very little lag, and it handled multitasking and Web browsing with only a few hints of slowing down.

Disappointingly, Huawei didn't include LTE on the phone. Hopefully we would be able to able to see an LTE connectivity in the next version.

Huawei Honor Bee First Look: Cameras

The 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with the dual Flash takes quick shots. The camera takes great shots, however, the same cannot be said when we took shots outside the venue.

There's a lot of noise in low light shots, and outdoor shots are often overexposed, destroying complete detail.The front-facing 2-megapixel shooter seemed to be slightly better, though we need to test the front-facing shooter in low-light settings.

Huawei Honor Bee First Look: Battery and Early Verdict

The phone's 1,760mAh removable battery should last at least 8 hours on a single charge. There's also the inclusion of dual SIM slots, which is pretty standard for an entry-level device.

With competition so strong in the low-end phone market, the Honor Bee appears to be a solid phone. At Rs. 4,999, the Honor Bee could be an affordable 3G option for someone who likes to see a feature rich smartphone but can't afford the more expensive price tag of a Yu Yureka or Lenovo A7000.

The Honor Bee is now available for purchase in India through Flipkart.