A new Android phone has been announced with very impressive specs for the price, and it’s available now in the UK. The Honor X6c costs just £129.99 but boasts a 120Hz screen, 50MP main camera, large battery and 128GB storage – specs that match or beat the £799 iPhone 16.
Those specs can also be seen on the £799 Samsung Galaxy S25, which has three 50MP cameras and the same storage. Admittedly the Honor has just one rear camera, but I applaud the firm for only using one on a device that costs this little. Rival Android makers often slap paltry 2MP lenses onto their budget phones to claim they have two or three cameras, but the results are often dreadful.
Then again, a look at the back of the X6c and Honor has designed it to look like it has three cameras. It does not! There is a QVGA sensor to help with portrait shots, and that’s it. The 50MP shooter can shoot video up to 1080p, and has Honor’s AI software built in to help improve images by erasing unwanted people or objects.
In fact, there are other AI tools built in too including image object identification, text summarisation and text translation, all accessible via the phone’s dedicated AI button on the left edge.
The selfie camera won’t be much to write home about at 5MP, but it’ll work for video calls and quick snaps.
Around the front is a 6.61-inch 120Hz LCD screen. A clue that this phone has cut a few corners to achieve its bargain basement price is the fact this is not an OLED screen. But if all you want or need from your phone is to call, text, use banking apps and social media and noddle around on email, you may not mind. It’s also only 720p, which is quite low resolution for 2025.
OLED screens offer brighter colours and better resolution, but use more power. If you value battery life, Honor’s low power screen and large 5,300mAh battery could be a winning combination. The firm says you’ll eke 60 minutes of call time out of 2 percent charge, so hopefully this thing goes and goes.
It even charges at 35W speeds with the right charger, which is faster than the Galaxy S25, which is limited to just 25W speeds. You can quickly grab 18 percent charge with a 10 minute plug in.
Unlike many more expensive phones, the Honor X6c is equipped with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor built into the power button. I often prefer this to in-screen sensors, and it’s rarer to see it these days. Speaking of rare, the phone even has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so don’t throw those wired earbuds away just yet.
Add to that IP64 water and dust resistance and an SGS drop resistance certification and you have a phone that has cut a few corners to reach its price point but one with a spec sheet that shoots above that price.
If you want one of the cheapest Android phones in the UK, this is one of them – just don’t expect good performance. The MediaTek Helio G81 Ultra processor is quite low-powered, so this is not a phone if you want to play lots of demanding mobile games.