Honor Holly review

Silly name, clever low-cost phone

Honor Holly review
A budget blower that's worth having

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Battery life

The Honor Holly comes with a removable 2,000mAh battery offering impressive life.

Being removable means you can carry a spare battery with you, meaning you can keep charged even when you're away from a power source. As for the battery power itself, I was impressed with how well it lasted.

Honor Holly review

When I played a 90 minute test video test on the Holly at full brightness, the battery dropped from 100% to 72% – about average for this level of handset. It's marginally harder on the battery than the Moto G (2014) that lost 26% of its battery power running the same video.

By the end of the test the phone did warm up quite a lot, although that will only be a problem if you're holding the phone to watch films for long periods of time.

Honor Holly review

I ran the test again on a 60% brightness just to see how it faired and it came out the other side with 79% left showing the screen is still a power sucker even with fewer pixels to power compared to flagship phones.

In everyday use I found the battery to cope well. For a moderate user this will easily get you through an entire day, if not a little further – it only really begins to struggle when taking on heavy processing tasks for extended periods of time.

Camera

The Huawei Honor Holly's camera isn't going to be a big selling point. The rear camera has an 8MP sensor with an LED flash whilst on the front there is a 2MP sensor.

Features on the camera include touch focus, face detection, panoramic mode and HDR as well as the terrifying beauty mode. It works on the selfie camera and flattens out your skin and enlarges your eyes to make yourself more "attractive," if your idea of attractive is a creepy doll from a noughties horror movie.

When taking shots I found the focus to be a little temperamental – it would sometimes fail to acknowledge my tap-to-focus, but after a few attempts it worked out what I wanted.

The shutter speed isn't particularly fast on the main camera, but it was never so slow that I missed a shot and it wasn't a major frustration.

Honor Holly review

The camera interface on the Holly is a little confusing during the first few uses. The buttons to take an image or video are easy enough to distinguish, but it took trial and error to work out which icons represented the different modes.

The icons in the bottom right are far clearer offering the ability to toggle flash and HDR as well as switching to the front camera.

There's a 4x zoom on the Honor Holly's camera that proves pretty poor at half distance let alone the full zoom. Here's an example of a non-zoomed photo and an image at full zoom.

The front camera is adequate for selfies but isn't anything in particular to write home about, while the face straight-up terrified me.

The Holly also comes with 1080p video recording but it is a simple affair with few features and the options of low, medium, high or fine video settings.

That means it's adequate for quick snaps, but is no competition for a flagship cameraphone.

James Peckham

James is Managing Editor for Android Police. Previously, he was Senior Phones Editor for TechRadar, and he has covered smartphones and the mobile space for the best part of a decade bringing you news on all the big announcements from top manufacturers making mobile phones and other portable gadgets. James is often testing out and reviewing the latest and greatest mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets, virtual reality headsets, fitness trackers and more. He once fell over.