Honor 5c – Powerful and sensible (Review)

The over-crowded price bracket of Rs 10000 in the Indian mobile market, gets another new entrant, the Honor 5c. Honor 5c is not exactly a successor to the Honor 5x. To me, both the Honor 5x and Honor 5c as parallel offerings from Honor. They both have their own strengths. Honor 5c’s strength is its Kirin 650 processor. Huawei made a bold step and introduced the Kirin 650 with the Honor 5c. It is a bold step for sure, but let’s see if it makes a difference.

Design

Honor 5C has a metal body and the brush metal finish is very similar to Honor 5x. The finishing gives it a better grip to handle. Honor 5c has a 5.2 inch display and weighs 155 grams. Though it is not a lightweight mobile, the size and the form factor makes it a very comfortable device to handle. The fingerprint sensor is at the back below the camera module. The camera module has a slight protrusion and it is assisted by a single LED flash. The audio jack is on the top while the micro USB port is at the bottom. The buttons are on the right. They have a good tactile feedback. The left has a the hybrid dual SIM tray. It can either have one nano SIM and a micro SD card or two nano SIM cards. Honor 5x had a separate tray for SD card and that was a huge welcome. Wish 5c had taken the same path. Otherwise the design is neat and it has a stylish appeal to it.

Display

Honor 5c’s 5.2 inch display can support screen resolution of 1920x1080p and that gives it good pixel density. The display takes over a major part on the body to display ratio. The bezels are thin, but the white color plastic on the front gives an illusion of a thicker display. The display is bright and the colors are natural. The text and image artifacts are crisp. Direct sunlight visibility is a concern and the screen is a fingerprint magnet. The viewing angles are good under indoors. The ambient light sensor is quick and responsive to change the brightness levels accordingly. Overall the display is pleasant to use.

Performance

Honor 5c is powered by HiSilicon Kirin 650 octa-core processor with 2GB RAM. You can read about the technical details of the Kirin processor from Vignesh’s post at TechZei. But talking about the real life performance of this processor, it is no less than any mid-level snapdragon processor. Infact it closely matched the performance of a few high end mobiles. It has the Adreno 405 for graphics processor and that helped it to run all the high end games, I threw in it, smoothly. On continuous gaming, it did warm up by 4 degree in 30 minutes, but no over heating issues. Also the mobile has 2 GB of RAM. I felt that it must have been loaded with a minimum of 3 GB RAM. Not only the games loaded slowly, the EUI has a few transition animation and a better RAM could have made the transitions smoother. The transition animations gives a pseudo-lag and I had to disable them from the developer options. Kirin 650 is definitely a good processor and with its 16 nm fabrication, it does give the mobile a strong spinal support. It would take you through your daily tasks with ease

Software

Honor 5c runs on Android 6.0 out of the box which is a huge relief for those who want the latest version on their mobile. The UI is custom skinned by Huawei with EMUI or the Emotion UI which is its own visual identity and set of features. The EMUI has a bunch of features which come in very handy. Though the Honor 5C is a 5.2 inch mobile, long press on the multi task button and you will get dual screen mode. In this mode you can use two apps at the same time. Swiping down the home screen with open the search bar on which you can search for any apps on the mobile. The best feature I love on the Honor 5C is the Simple Homescreen style which would be very useful for senior citizens. My 90 year old granpa is already in love with his new Honor 5C. Happy Grandpa, Happy Grandson!

Similar to the Simple Home-screen is the battery saving mode. In this mode the screen is black with large white icons. These icons point to only the critical apps in the mobile while data and other connectivity is disabled. There are other useful features like floating doc, motion control gestures, One Hand UI, voice control, etc… The mobile has an inbuilt activity tracker application, which is always on and tracking your steps. It can also track activity by GPS location. Though the tracker app is not very accurate, it is a very handy feature. Also customization options are plenty.

If there is one thing I hate about the UI, that would be the transition animations. These animations give the mobile a pseudo lag feel and it sort of frustrates as times. It can be disabled via the settings in developer options, but how many would care to do it? I wish Honor had provided a simple toggle in the UI to disable animations.

Camera

Honor 5c has a 13 MP shooter at the back and a 8MP front shooter. The 13 MP rear camera has nothing special to mention, but an average mobile camera. Frankly, I was expecting a lot out of the camera, mainly because of the dedicated digital signal processor chip. The DSP was able to give it a faster processing speed between snaps and enhance the low light shots quality. But color reproduction was not perfect and very inconsistent. At challenging light conditions, the yellows were under-saturated and appeared white. Overall, the colors appeared faded out and not producing that punchy effect. As mentioned, low light performance was commendable and that requires a special mention. The front facing 8 MP camera is a good selfie shooter and good for video calls. Camera on the Honor 5c failed to impress me, probably I had my expectation levels way too high!

Check out the camera samples on our FB page!

Battery

The mobile is powered by 3,000mAh battery. With the included charger, the battery filled up in 2 hours from 10% to 100%. My normal usage would include about 30 min of calls, regularly checking the screens for whatsapp and Facebook notifications, clicking a few shots with the camera and a few hours spent on watching YouTube and video clips. On my normal usage, I get over 30 hours of battery life with upto 3.5 hours of screen on time. Thanks to its small screen and resource sensitive processor, the Honor 5c has good battery life that you can depend on.

Verdict

The Honor 5C has come out to be one my favorite mobiles in the Rs 10000 segment due to its battery and performance. The camera performance is a point of worry, only if you are really judgmental about colors. The size of the mobile is compact and highly ergonomic. The design is slick and sturdy. EMUI, the software layer on Honor 5c is very interesting. It is highly functional and feature rich. Huawei has done a good job in optimizing Android M for Honor 5c. The display is decently pleasant. Overall Honor 5c is money well spent and you would never regret buying it. It is highly recommended by Gadgetdetail and it earns a worthy spot in our smart recommendation list.

It is priced at Rs 10,999 while authoring this review and is available exclusively on Flipkart.