Home Flagship Router - Honor Router Pro 2 Review

With the rapid development of mobile devices such as smart phones, wireless routers also have rapidly spread in the past ten years and have become one of the necessary IT equipment in today's homes.However, most ordinary consumers are really confused when purchasing routers, and they often regard "more antennas" and "affordable prices" as the purchasing criteria.In fact, more antennas does not mean that the signal is stronger, and this Honor Router Pro 2 we introduced here does not see any antennas in appearance.


Appearance
The appearance design of the Honor Router Pro 2 continues the simple and stylish style, maintaining the "square box" shape of the Honor series routers, and because the antenna is built into the plastic case, the appearance of the Honor Router Pro 2 has a strong sense of unity.In addition, the size of Honor Router Pro 2 is 115 mm x 115 mm x 108 mm and weighs is 343g (w/o charger power). At first glance, we will think that it is relatively large, but in fact theHonor Router Pro 2 takes up less space than then the traditional router, and the simple and elegant shape of the Honor Router Pro 2 can also be better integrated with the stylish home.


There is only one H key at the front of the Honor Router Pro 2 (with WPS function at the same time). With the H button, two Smart Link routers can be connected to the router's WiFi with one-click networking to expand the network, and one-click can be used to connect smart home products such as Huawei boxes that support HiLink to the router's WiFi to form a distributed Smart home network. In addition, the front and bottom connections are designed with bar-shaped status indicators similar to "coast lights". It is red when not connected to the network, and green after connection to the network successful


The back of the Honor Router Pro 2 is equipped with a power interface and four gigabit network cable interfaces. These four interfaces do not need to distinguish between WAN and LAN ports. One disadvantage is that the network ports do not have indicators, which cannot display the current status of each network port. The side of the Honor Router Pro 2 is also equipped with a USB 3.0 interface, which can be used as a micro NAS and can be connected to external storage devices such as U disks, mobile hard drives.



At the bottom of the Honor Router Pro 2, there is a large area of non-slip mats around the bottom and some basic information about the router, and on the top of the device has no other elements except the engraved logo of "HONOR" .



The Honor router PRO2 is equipped with a 12V / 2A high-power charger, which can provide sufficient power for the router, even if it is connected to a large-capacity mobile hard disk. However, the size of the charger power is a little larger, which may affect the use of other jacks when using a wall outlet.



Hardware Configuration
The quality of the CPU determines the computing speed and stability of a device. A high-performance CPU allows the router to have sufficient response time and fast response speed when processing data exchange between the local area network and the external network, so as to obtain a stable signal without losing data packs.The Honor Router Pro 2 is equipped with Huawei ’s new self-developed quad-core 1.4GHz CPU-Hi5651 processor, which can support four Gigabit Ethernet ports and 1167M dual-band WIFI.The picture below shows the disassembled PCB circuit board. From this we did not see this processor, it should be hidden under the shield, but we saw the 256M flash memory from Spansion company, and two more independently developed Lingxiao Hi1151 Wi-Fi chip by Huawei.




The more antennas ≠ the stronger the signal.This is because the transmission range of the wireless router is determined by the IEEE802.11 protocol rather than the antenna.The strength of the signal and the ability to "pass through the wall" depend on the router's transmit power (can't over 20dB according to regulations).The Honor Route Pro 2 is equipped with two high-power amplifiers for each of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi channels, giving it stronger signal coverage and wall penetration capabilities. The other two independent antennas are embedded in the inner wall of the processor case.


Convenience and APP
In addition to the hardware configuration, the usability of connection and available apps are also important factors in measuring the quality of a router.The initial configuration of the Honor Router Pro 2 is very simple. After connecting the power charger and home broadband, the mobile phone is connected to the HUAWEI-XXX WiFi, log in to 192.168.3.1 and then enter account and password to access the network.In addition, Honor Routing Pro 2 also provides the function of obtaining account passwords from the old router, that is, first connect the old router to the power supply, and then use a network cable to connect the WAN port of the old router and any network port of the Honor Router Pro 2, and finally Click the "Get from old router" button in the phone connection interface.



The Honor Router Pro 2 hasn't independent APP but is integrated into the Huawei "Smart Home" APP. In addition to the common functions of the router in the "Smart Home" APP, it also supports the mobile game acceleration function.When this function is turned on, the Honor Router Pro 2 will establish a dedicated channel for mobile phones to reduce the delay and jitter during playing games, but this function only supports Huawei and Honor phones of EMUI9.0 or above. In addition, Honor Router Pro 2 also supports dual-network dual-pass function, which can access the broadband of two different operators at the same time, and will assign the optimal network to different terminals automatically, but it should be noted that the speeds of the two broadband networks cannot be superimposed.In the WiFi settings, we can also see that the Honor Router Pro 2 has dual band-in-one function and the router will automatically select the current optimal WiFi channel for the user, so there is no need for them to select the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band manually.There are also IoT exclusive channels and the H button with one-click smart link, which reflect Huawei's determination to create a smart home IoT ecosystem.



When connecting to external storage devices, the Honor Router Pro 2 is also very simple to operate. It can be viewed and used on the mobile phone or PC by directly connecting to the USB interface of the router. Unfortunately, it does not support remote access to the Internet and does not have the function of backing up mobile phone pictures automatically .



Signal strength
The Honor Router Pro 2 has a new Gigabit quad-core processor and four high-power signal amplifiers. Honor officialoclaimed that it can cover large units of 120 square meters and complex complexes. The following pictures shows the signal strength results of different locations tested by the relevant software in an apartment of 110 square meters. It can be seen that in the same room, the signal strength is about -30dBm, the signal strength of a wall separated by the same floor is about -45 dBm, the signal strength of the lower floor is about -50 dBm.Of course, we also tested the signal strength when playing games. With the support of the Honor Router Pro 2's game acceleration function, the network of Honor Phone with EMUI9.0 system is relatively stable during the entire game , and there isn't stutter caused by network delay.


As the latest flagship router released by Honor, the highly recognizable “square box” appearance and the new self-developed Lingxiao quad-core full Gigabit processor make the Honor Router Pro 2 reveal its unique temperament everywhere. Coupled with strong coverage and signal strength, convenient and practical functions such as the ability to obtain account passwords from old routers, "H" one-click IoT ,show that the Honor Route Pro 2 can perfectly match the "flagship" in daily home routers.