Honor 5x – designed to impress [Review]

The Huawei Honor 5X was announced in the CES earlier this year and it quickly made it to the shelves in India. It is the first mobile with a “metal body and finger print scanner at the back” design. At Rs 12499, the Honor 5X is in a market segment that has fierce competitors like the Le 1s and the Redmi Note 3. Huawei is a master when it comes to making low-cost mobile feel premium and appeal to a larger range of audience.

Design

Honor 5x is a 5.5 inch device which feels very sleek and premium in the hand. It is available in Silver, Gold and black color variants. The metal back with a brushed metal finish makes the mobile stand tall among the crowd. It does have plastic. The strips on the top and bottom of the back panel is plastic and most of the front part is plastic as well. The plastic meets metal seamlessly to give a unibody design. While many wish that it had full metal body, I would differ and say that the mix of plastic and metal paves way for better ergonomics. The mobile is not slippery to hold and it feels comfortable to use.

The headphone jack is on the top, power and volume keys are at the right and the micro USB port is flanked by speaker grills at the bottom. The Honor 5x has varities of card slots. Slot 1 can take in a micro SIM card while the second slot can take in a nano SIM card and a microSD card at the same time. Both the SIM card slots are 4G enabled.

Display

The Honor 5x has a 5.5 inch IPS LCD display that supports a resolution of 1080 x 1920 px. 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 full HD display is a welcome upgrade in this segment. The colors in the display are vibrant and rightly saturated. It has good brightness levels and good direct sunlight readability. The ambient light sensor is quick and responsive to change the brightness levels accordingly. Also the contrast ratio is decent. Multiple viewing angles don’t affect the colors but the contrast varies with different angles. Though there is option to tweak the color temperature, the default setting were warm enough and easy on the eyes.

Performance

Honor 5X is powered by Snapdragon 616 octa-core processor with 4 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz and 4 cores clocked at 1.2 GHz. There is a variant with 3 GB or RAM. But my review unit is a 2 GB variant which will be available in India. It is assisted by Adreno 405 GPU for graphics. Honestly, I felt that the 3 GB RAM would have been better than the 2 GB of RAM. Loading graphic intensive games took a bit longer. But once loaded, the apps and the games ran smoothly. Graphic intensive games did show signs of frame lag and frame drops. Prolonged gaming of shooting videos rendered the mobile warmer than room temperature. It does not have any overheating issues though. Occasionally the UI also lagged a bit. Disabling the transition animations, from developer option, eased the lag to a great extent. The benchmark test performance was good and met expectations from a device in this segment. The Honor 5x is not a beast on performance, but when it comes to handling your everyday task, it would be a smooth sail.

Fingerprint scanner

Fingerprint scanners were a luxury, enjoyed only on top end smartphones. But the story turned around when Coolpad Note 3 was introduced. Taking cue from there, many smartphones now have fingerprint scanner. The fingerprint scanner on Honor 5x is at he back, just below the camera module. It is as fast as the sensor in Coolpad Note 3. It is accurate and success rate of responding to a valid fingerprint is 99.99% at the first contact. The fingerprint scanner in Honor 5x can do more than just unlocking the screen. It can secure your files, make or answer calls, click pictures and also open apps. Each finger can be configured for different actions. It can take upto 5 fingerprints and just for the sake of it, I also tried with my lip print. It worked! To register a finger print, it requires just 5 imprints. The finger print can be sensed from any angle on the sensor. The finger print scanner on the Honor 5x is not just fast, it is versatile as well.

Camera

Honor 5x has a 13 MP sensor with a fast f/2.0 lens on the rear. The camera app UI is heavily inspired by iPhone. But it does the job. The shutter button is big, bright and easily accessible. The shutter can also be activated by the volume keys but it can be programmed to act as zoom or focus button. It supports pinch to zoom. Apart from the auto mode, there is beauty mode to enhance skin tone softening and a food mode to click pictures of food. The video mode can capture video upto 1080p fps. It also has time-lapse mode, but there is no slow motion. On the picture mode, tapping anywhere on the screen focuses the object. Also you can slide the finger to adjust exposure, once the focus is locked. Long pressing on the screen gives you the ability to focus on an object and simultaneously adjust the exposure based on another zone in the frame. This is very useful for portrait shot under challenging light conditions. You can focus on the face in the foreground and adjust the exposure according to a light source in the background.

Check the album below for images and video samples.

As far as the image quality is concerned, Honor 5x impresses with it sharpness and contrast under ample light conditions. It also does not disappoint under low light conditions, but it lacks good dynamic range. The front facing 5MP camera can take wide-angle selfies. It did produce some sharp results under day light and relatively decent self portraits under indoor lighting. Overall, the Honor 5x impresses with it camera to a certain extent, but considering the price of this device and the competition available in this range, it falls a bit short of being called a great camera mobile.

Software UI

Honor 5x is powered by Android 5.1.1 out of the box and is skinned with EMUI 3.1 on top. Android 6 with EMUI 4.0 is expected to be rolled out soon. EMUI is not just a skin, but I would call it a forked version of Android. The native android experience has been changed in every corner. The launcher does not have app drawer, but it has the app desk with all the installed apps laid out on the home screens. The notification tray has a timeline-like UI and the shortcut toggles are visible on a swipe from the notifications screen. I had some issues with certain notifications, where the details were in black font against black background. The menu keys are laid out on-screen, which is a lot better than non-backlit menu keys. The app switcher UI is out dated and clearing the apps running on background is a gesture that you will eventually learn, though not intuitive.

EMUI, the 3.1 has a considerable list of noteworthy features that are handy with utility value. It has a few themes for customization and personalization. The phone manager application has a bunch of features like cleaning cache, power saving options, data management, notification management, lock applications, etc. It has a bunch of sensible features packed into this little beast. Apart from these utility applications, the UI does have a very few pre-loaded applications. Overall the UI is snappy and fast to use. The transition animations are unnecessary and I strongly recommend you to disable animations from the developer options, for a better lag-free user experience.

Battery

Honor 5x is equipped with a 3000 mAh lithium polymer battery. Also the mobile is powered by a mid range processor and it has a 1080p display. So battery life is not at all an issue with the Honor 5x.  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. With this usage, the mobile lasted for more than a day. At the end of 24 hours, I would still be left with 20-25% of battery. The phone comes bundled with a 5v 1A charger, though it supports 2A charger. The variant that is launched in India does not support quick charge and if it had, it would have been a game changer for Huawei in India. The Indian variant of Honor 5x takes little less than 2 hours to get charged from 20 to 100%, on an average.

Verdict

It all boils down to the price, especially in this segment. The Honor 5x is priced at Rs 12499 and for the price you pay, here is what you get.

• Stylish metal design and quality construction material
• Good quality 5.5 inch full HD display
• Fast and accurate fingerprint sensor
• Decent camera
• Good battery life

On the downside, the performance of the Honor 5x is not lag free. The mid range processor and 2 GB of RAM manages to keep the mobile running for average daily activities and you dare not ask anything more than that. EMUI is evolving and is getting mature with every version. But with EMUI 4.0 around the corner, a lot can be expected from the Honor 5x. The other alternatives are the Le 1s and the Redmi Note 3 in this price range and design. The Le 1s has a beast of a processor but falls short in battery performance. The Redmi Note 3 has a fantastic camera and mature MIUI, but availability is a concern. I would recommend the Honor 5x for anyone who is looking to buy a good smart phone in this price range.

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