Honor Holly 2 Plus Review: What could have been so right, just isn't

On paper, the Holly 2 Plus should be a great device. Officially launched a few days ago, it’s got some decent specs, especially with a very low price tag of Rs 8,499. Clearly Honor, the smartphone division of Huawei, is aiming to compete with other stellar phones in the category, like the Samsung Galaxy On5 and the older Lenovo K3 Note, but how does it match?

The Holly 2 Plus has a plastic unibody with a non-removable battery. What looks like a metal frame is actually plastic, and the rear panel has a textured look and feel to it. The standard volume rocker and power button are on the right spine, 3.5mm jack at the top, and micro USB and loudspeakers on the bottom. All in all, it’s easy enough on the eyes.

But, talking about loudspeakers, the ones on the Holly 2 Plus are only about mediocre. DOn’t get me wrong, they’re really loud for the tiny package, but audio sounds slightly tinny and hollow when turned up to max.



The phone features a 5-inch HD (1280x720) display at 294 ppi, and this doesn’t fare much better than the sound. Though not the brightest display I’ve seen, colours do have a soft vibrance to them. Unfortunately, the tradeoff is a not-so-great viewing angle.

I did, however, face a strange issue with the display in particular. The soft buttons, and occasionally the screen in entirety, has a tendency to be unresponsive. There’s been multiple incidents where I’ve had to tap a button or app twice or thrice before it registers; clearly an isse with the display as the previous touchees didn’t trigger the haptic feedback.

But as far as performance goes, the Holly 2 Plus is about standard for budget smartphone. The 1.3GHz quad-core Mediatek MT6735P processor with 2GB RAM can multitask no problem, and mid-level games work just fine too. Of course, don’t expect to run any games with demanding graphics without some serious lag.

The Holly 2 Plus has a 13MP rear camera and a 5MP on the front and, unfortunately, there were some real problems here. While photos were definitely bright enough on both cameras, under varying lighting conditions, colours tend to to be washed out. Additionally, the saturation and contrast settings are buried in a settings menu three clicks away, and are restricted to a +1/-1 setting. To add to that, the selfie camera has a strange proclivity to sport lens flares when pointed towards artificial lighting. Despite being someone who doesn’t click a lot of photos, all of these flaws combined are not something I can overlook.

On the plus side for the Holly 2 Plus, battery life is just terrific. With 4000mAh under the hood, it can leisurely take you through a regular work day, and a little of the next, on a single charge. I’d average it close to a solid 18-20 hours on even hard usage (video watching, browsing, multi tasking).



Lastly, the Holly 2 Plus runs on Android 5.1 with Honor’s own EmotionUI 3.0 on top. It’s been pretty great in previous iterations, but is somewhat unintuitive this time around. For instance, on the multitasking screen (that shows you all the apps you have open), the instruction says “slide up to close all apps. Sliding one app thumbnail up or down closes it. So how do you close them all at once? Well, it turns out you have to place your thumb on the bit of text itself and then slide to close them all. Not particularly clear, Honor.
 

At the end of the day, I can’t nominate the Holly 2 Plus. Sure, it’s decent enough on it’s own but, even if you’re specifically looking for a budget smartphone, there’s plenty of better options. And those picks include Honor’s older versions as well. The Holly 2 Plus doesn’t do anything completely horribly, but the little things add up in the end.