The Huawei Y series is quite active nowadays, and soon after, we got our hands on the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019. The Chinese smartphone maker has launched now its younger sibling, Huawei Y6 Prime 2019, in the Pakistani market.
It is one of the most affordable phones from Huawei in the country, which comes with trendy features like the 19:9 aspect ratio and a teardrop notch.
The budget smartphone has been launched at PKR 21,499 but is it worth spending your hard-earned money After long hours of an in-depth assessment of the Huawei Y6 Prime 2019, here is what I think about the device.
Y6 Prime 2019 specs
- Display: 6.09 inches, IPS LCD
- OS: Android 9.0, EMUI 9
- Chipset: MT 6761 Helio A22
- RAM/ROM: 2GB/32GB
- Camera (rear): 13MP
- Camera (front): 8MP
- Battery: 3020 mAh
Design and Display
As soon as I held the phone in my hands, it reminded me of the much older and pricier Huawei P20 lite, not because of its premium build but because of its greatly manageable design. The device sits in one’s hands perfectly and is neither too big nor too small to hold.
The overall build quality is excellent. I had the device in Sapphire blue color, which has a glitter effect on its back that looks quite catchy. The body is made entirely out of plastic, including the frame, but even then, it doesn’t look cheap, and the design justifies the price.
Also Read: Huawei Y6s Review
On the back of the phone, you can find a single camera along with the flash on the top left while a fingerprint scanner sits just in the place where your finger hovers naturally. The curved display of the phone helps a great deal in maintaining a firm grip on the device.
Like all the Huawei phones the power key and the volume rocker in the Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 is on the right side. On the left, you can find a dual SIM card slot.
The top of the phone carries a 3.5mm headphone jack along with a noise cancellation mic, and, on the bottom, you can find a micro USB charging port along with two grills, only one of which is the speaker and the other has the primary microphone in it.
“Minimalist” would be a great word to describe the design of the phone. The slim frame and the curved back edges don’t let the phone slip from hand. The sapphire blue color of the Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 also does not attract as many fingerprints as the Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 did with its glossy back.
Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 packs a 6.09-inch HD+ display. It’s an IPS LCD panel with a 1560 x 720 resolution. It comes with a dewdrop notch, which helps to provide more screen space along with minimum bezels at the sides. At the bottom of the display, there is a slightly thick chin carrying the brand name, which is not too big to obstruct the user’s viewing experience.
In indoors, the color reproduction on the screen is excellent, and one can’t complain after learning that even the much pricey Oppo A7, which comes with almost double the price of Huawei Y6 Prime 2019, also features just a 720p display.
So the display doesn’t let you complain about its great viewing angles and apt saturation, although a cool hue can visibly be noticed.
In outdoors, however, the display is not as good as you might expect. The viewing angles start to get affected severely, and even the full brightness does not help in the clear view of the screen.
As we talk about it, the toggle for the auto-brightness is missing in the quick settings in the status bar, which is quite irritating for the people like me who don’t want to bother opening the settings time and again to toggle the auto-brightness on or off.
OS
Interestingly, Huawei Y6 Prime 21019 is equipped with the Android Pie out of the box. So you can enjoy all the perks of the latest Android OS. An EMUI 9.0.1 skin is laid on top, which gives you some additional usability but also comes with bloatware.
It’s really odd to see that the Y7 Prime 2019 and the Honor 8C, both of which are pricier than this phone, come with Android Oreo, but the cheapest of them all comes with the Android Pie and newer version of EMUI.
Huawei claims that the EMUI is almost 26% faster than the previous iteration and also has better battery optimization. While in phones with a higher price tag and better specs, a GPU Turbo tech is also embedded within the EMUI. Still, Huawei Y6 Prime lacks this privilege because of its entry-level features, and extremely affordable price.
Nonetheless, it packs great features, gesture navigation being one of them. There is also a digital balance feature that is exclusive to EMUI 9. It keeps track of the time you spend on your smartphone and warns you if you exceed the limit, thus curtailing your bad habit of sticking to your smartphone all day.
Performance and Battery
Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 packs an entry-level MediaTek processor MT6761 Helio A22 paired with 2GB RAM and 32 GB internal storage, which can also be enhanced via a micro SD card.
When it comes to performance, a phone with this price tag and such minimal specs is not expected to outperform the ones with a higher price like the Vivo Y95, but such a phone is also not expected to lag even when performing regular tasks.
The RAM management is poor on the device. Heavily customized skin eats up the already minimal resources of the device, and multitasking even between social media apps like Facebook and Instagram causes the apps to restart.
Since with such low profile specs, I never bothered to play heavy games after when I realized that the phone showed hiccups even at playing Subway Surfers and Fruit Ninja games. Though the lag is quite a big problem but keeping minimum apps in the device may limit this to a certain extent.
Huawei Y6 Prime packs a 3020 mAh battery, and for such a low battery value, the endurance is quite good. In one hour of light usage, although we continuously experience stutter, the phone consumed only 12% battery, which means that for light users, the phone can cut through your whole day before wanting a charge.
Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 does not deliver satisfactory performance, and even the usual tasks like scrolling through long web pages become a problem.
Even heavy users can benefit from the battery, equally. Although the device lags badly, the real-life test reveals that the phone only dropped 15% of battery in heavy usage. It means you are looking at almost 6 hours of screen on time, which is pretty satisfactory considering that it only packs a 3020 mAh cell.
Camera
Huawei Y6 Prime packs a single camera, and it’s pretty disappointing to see that even Huawei pioneered the AI technology in cameras; they did not include an AI engine in the Huawei Y6 Prime 2019. The phone packs a 13MP single camera setup on the back with very few photography options and modes.
The front-facing camera has an 8MP lens sitting in the teardrop notch. It comes with some fancy features for a better selfie experience.
The auto mode on the Huawei Y6 Prime 2019 is nothing out of this world but is not too bad either. It snaps decent pictures and does not tend to over saturate the colors like most of the Huawei devices do, yet the brightness on the photographs is off the charts, and the highlights are badly blown out.
Here are some camera samples from the 13MP camera sensor of the device.
Notice that the HDR mode is very aggressive and tends to blow out the image instead of keeping the color reproduction and the dynamic range balanced.
Be it night photography or broad daylight pictures, the camera reacts the same way in both auto and HDR modes, washing out the true colors and treating the image heavily.
Verdict
The design of the Huawei y6 Prime 2019 is slim, sleek, and manageable with one hand. Even in direct sun, light the display legibility is average. But it’s the performance that disappointed us.
The camera of the phone is also a nightmare and is not worth your money if you want a camera-centric device. Even the low price of the phone did not fetch any attraction.
Cool review
Great work team PhoneYear
PhoneYear great review