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The Honor 6 comes with a generously sized 3100mAh battery. That's bigger even than the Samsung Galaxy S5 and its 2800mAh example.
Sure enough, the phone lasted out well during my test period, though nothing that will make you sit up and take notice. You'll still want to charge it at the end of every day, but you won't be struggling to make it through that day or anxiously dropping the screen brightness and closing apps to make it last.
As a use case scenario, I took the Honor 6 off charge at 9:15 in the morning, and subjected it to a full day of above average usage. This entailed 30 minutes of solid gaming (gotta love Blocky Roads), a little emailing, the taking of a couple of brief HD videos, and some web browsing.
After putting the phone into Airplane mode overnight, it was 12:15 the next day when I put it back on charge, and it still had 11% left in the tank.
More scientifically, I put the Honor 6 through our usual battery test. This involves running a 90 minute 720p video, with the screen set to full brightness and all notifications active.
I got an average remaining battery amount of 84% from these tests. That's pretty good going, and matches the Samsung Galaxy S5, which is well known for its strong battery performance. It's also a full 10% better than Huawei's recent Ascend P7.
On the interface front, Huawei has continued with some of its interesting, if somewhat overbearing practices. You'll get notifications when power-sapping apps are left running in the background, along with the option to quickly cull them.
Initially, this seemed like a useful feature, but it becomes a little annoying. After all, Android has been designed with such background multi-tasking in mind. If this kicked in when the battery life reached, say, 30%, I could understand.
But you'll be receiving these nagging requests even when your phone is fully charged, and when using simple apps like Huawei's own photo gallery. It makes the simple act of using apps feel like an excessive, wasteful, even guilty experience, which is surely not the point here.
Huawei also includes an ultra power saving mode that it claims can lead to 48 hours of battery life, but it's a pretty extreme mode. It keeps only basic functions like calling and messaging, cutting everything else out. Even colours go out of the window, with a simple, dim, monochrome picture.
Naturally, this isn't a practical way to use your phone long or even medium turn, it's less functional than a feature phone in this state.
But when you're caught away from a power point with single digits remaining on the battery percentage meter, it's a nice option to have.
