Like many Chinese manufacturers, Huawei is well-known for launching smartphones with impressive specifications at budget-friendly prices. However, with new Android devices being announced every now and then, it is imperative that a company ups its game to manufacture a device that stands out from the crowd. Therefore, in order to stay relevant in the competitive market, Huawei released its Honor lineup of devices in 2012 with the Huawei Honor.
Huawei Honor 5X
Rs 12,999What Is Good?
- Premium metal build
- Gorgeous display
- Decent battery life
- Excellent fingerprint scanner
What Is Bad?
- Software lags on several occasions
- Sub-par performance
- Loudspeaker could have been better
Four years since, and the company has done well in the budget smartphone segment. The Honor 5X, the latest addition to the Honor lineup, builds up on everything good that we’ve seen in its predecessors and presents it in a much more nuanced fashion. More so, the device is a successor to the Honor 4X, a brilliant device in its own right, which was also the one of the first devices to launch with 4G LTE connectivity at the time in India.
We got our hands on the Honor 5X. Read our full review to find out how this latest device from Honor fares.
Design
Huawei follows the same design principle for all the phones in its Honor series, and so the Honor 5X looks a lot like the previous iterations. In fact, it looks like a combination of the company’s high-end device, the Honor 7 and the much more affordable Honor 4X.
Display
Hardware
Huawei manufactures their own chipsets and integrate them on their smartphones instead of using processors from chipmakers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek. However, this isn’t the case with the Honor 5X in which the company has used an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor with all cores clocked at 1.2GHz. The device has 2GB of RAM which is a bit of a letdown when compared to the 3GB of RAM that is offered by many smartphones in the same price range nowadays.
Software and apps
The influence of iOS in Chinese smartphones is quite evident nowadays, and even on this phone’s interface, right from the app drawer to the app icons, one can notice the stark similarities to Apple’s iOS. The Honor 5X runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) on top of it, but it is very hard to find material design elements in this UI.
Like other UIs, Emotion UI too lacks an app drawer and makes use of the main screen itself to organise all the apps and widgets. The UI also supports Control Centre which can be launched with a swipe from bottom to top. It gives access to apps such as flashlight and camera, but these can only be used from the lock screen.
Emotion UI 3.1 supports a theme engine which also allows you to change themes for app icons. Evidently, the company has increased the support for themes for developers lately. From the theme engine, you can also customise on-screen navigation buttons from the Settings app.
There are some useful shortcuts and gestures available in the UI such as ‘click the fingerprint scanner to go back,’ ‘hold the fingerprint scanner for a few seconds to go to the home screen,’ and ‘hold the fingerprint scanner to answer a call,’ and ‘slide upwards on the fingerprint scanner to show the recently viewed apps.’ It also has the ‘double-tap the screen to wake up’ gesture which didn’t work most of the time.
The notification panel is divided into two sections – notifications and shortcuts. By pulling down the left side of the notification bar, you can access the notifications menu and by pulling down the right side, you can access the quick setting menu. We found the Notification Centre to be quite messy and the device also lagged a lot while we used it. The Recent apps panel is designed well, though. While Android-based devices usually have a stack-based multi-tasking screen, here we have an iOS-based multitasking screen with four apps on each screen.
The UI also offers a Dual-window mode, which we found to be of no use as the SystemUI app crashed each time we tried to use this feature.
Camera:
As with other Huawei devices, the Honor 5X comes with a basic player for music and videos. Not surprisingly, the icons for both these applications resemble that of the default apps on iOS. The music player has a basic design and it also displays lyrics which can be seen by sliding from left to right on the current song screen. There is also a special toggle for DTS sound. We tested the DTS sound with our reference headphones and found the sound to be quite annoying at maximum volume levels. The device doesn’t come bundled with headphones in the box.
Performance
This is the department where the Honor 5X falls behind its competitors. Under the hood, there is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor which is an upgraded model of the Snapdragon 615 processor released last year.
In day-to-day life, the Honor 5X behaves in an erratic manner. By this, we mean that while at times the device has no lag or stutter while we use numerous apps, at other times, it stutters a lot. Clearly, EMUI 3.1 has not been as optimised as what we’ve seen on other Huawei devices like the Honor 7 and the Honor 4X. Games such as Asphalt 8 and Beach Buggy Racing run well without any lags or hiccups. However, graphic-intensive ones like Nova 3 struggle to run smoothly and the dropped frames are visible in each level. That apart, the rear of the device tends to get warm. We also noticed that after running graphic-intensive apps, the UI starts to lag a lot, and at times, we had to restart the device in order to get it to function normally again.
The call quality on the Honor 5X is quite good, even in very noisy environments. The vocals are clear and there were no complaints on the other side as well. That said, the device doesn’t come across as a strong contender against its rivals in terms of performance as of now, and we think that an update for EMUI in the future could fix all these bugs and strengthen the device’s case.
Battery life
The Honor 5X carries a 3,000mAh battery which is fairly decent for a mid-range smartphone. The device offers excellent battery life, with up to four and a half hours of screen-on time that involves watching videos,browsing the internet, using social networking apps, and most importantly taking pictures. The device lacks support for fast charge, and we feel that Huawei should have included fast charging capabilities in this device as other smartphones like Vibe P1 and Moto G Turbo offer fast charge capability. EMUI comes with three power saving modes- Ultra, Smart, and Normal which further increase the juice of the device.
Conclusion
Priced at Rs.12,999, the Honor 5X, is a decent smartphone with a fantastic fingerprint scanner, a great battery life, and a beautiful design. It falls behind its competitors in terms of software and performance. However, these issues can be easily fixed with updates from the company in the future. Also, considering the fact that other devices in its price point offer 3GB of RAM, we feel that the manufacturers should’ve also offered the same on this device. In the same price point, there are some good options available such as the Moto G Turbo Edition, which offers an almost stock Android experience, and the Lenovo Vibe P1, which has a bigger battery and also better performance, that you might want to consider.