Software, Settings

Huawei Honor ships with Android 2.3.6, but our sample already has already been upgraded to Android 4.0.3. Despite being marked "beta," the OS works fine. On a side note, localization quality suffers, sometimes down to complete gibberish. Besides, a few bundled apps are in Chinese.

Let's proceed to the lockscreen. By default, you can either unlock the device or launch the camera app by moving the icon to either side. Convenient enough, but more customization options would've been nice. Anyway, at this stage, you might want to boost security by setting up the PIN, password, face recognition, etc.

The Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.3) hasn't changed much since the previous version. There are familiar tabs with app icons and widgets. Speaking of those, AccuWeather is the only third-party widget of all bundled.

Most bundled apps are provided by Huawei. Firstly, there's Cloud+ that obviously provides access to company's cloud services. The feature list is impressive, with backup storage, app download, and as much as 160GB of storage space for personal needs.

However, this service is also marked "beta." After you've registered, the list of actually available features turns out to be much shorter.

At the moment of writing, the only available services were: app settings backup, app download from Hispace, a Chinese variant of Android Market, and smartphone location (we couldn't check if it worked). We hope Cloud+ has evolved since then. Feel free to comment on this, if you know of features which have become available.

Aside from Huawei's software, there's only one third-party app: a free version of DocumentsToGo that only lets you view files, not edit them.

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