Huawei announced the successor of the popular Honor 4X in India last month and the device is now available for purchase on Flipkart for Rs 12,999. The new Honor 5X comes with improved specs when compared to the predecessor. The new Honor 5X sports a 5.5 inch Full HD (1920 X 1080p) display and is powered by the Snapdragon 616 Octa core 64-bit processor (1.7 GHz Cortex A53 and quad-core 1.2 GHz A53) coupled with 2GB RAM.
So how good is the device for the price, let’s find out in this review.
Here is the video review.
Design and Build:
Design wise, the Honor 5X looks pretty good with all metal design and comes in gold, silver and gray variants. The unit we tested was the silver variant and it comes with a brushed metal finishing which looks great. The camera unit on the rear panel has a slight bump. The fingerprint scanner, LED flash and camera unit have been given a chamfered finishing. The front panel has 5MP camera, sensors, 5.5 inches Full HD display and on-screen touch buttons. The left side houses the dual SIM card slots while the power and volume keys are located on right side. The top houses the 3.5 mm audio jack and secondary microphone. The micro USB charging slot and the speaker are located on the bottom panel. Even though it has on screen buttons, there is a lot of space wasted below the display. On the left side, you have two ejectable trays, one for micro SIM card and a second one for nano SIM and micro SD card.
The rear panel has slightly curved finishing and comes with 13MP rear camera, LED flash and a fingerprint scanner located at the bottom of the camera unit. There is also Honor branding at the bottom. The device is pretty slim, compact and feels light in hands. Overall, the phone feels good in hands and has good build quality.
Display:
Honor hasn’t increased the screen size on the 5X when compared the 4X and it still comes with 5.5 inches of display. But the display panel has been given a major bump to full HD AMOLED panel with 401 PPI. The colors look pretty vibrant and viewing angles are also quite good on the display. Sadly there is no protection offered for the display and the company is shipping with the default screen guard installed.
The touch response on the display was decent and we suspect this could be due to the screen guard installed. Even on 4X, we had faced this issue. The text is sharp and pretty much viewable in sunlight as well. You can also set the color temperature for the display from the settings.
Software:
Honor 5X comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop and a custom UI on top of it. The EMUI is version 3.1 on the Honor 5X. There is also promised upgrade to Android Marshmallow later this year. The EMUI 3.1 looks similar to the one on Honor 4X, but there has been some tweaks to the notification area and also the settings and it now feels a bit more polished. Under the settings, you can see a plethora of options to customize the device.
The phone comes with themes support and once you have inserted the SIM card in the device you have the option to download themes from the store. You can also customize the themes to create your own theme with ringtones, icons, lock screen etc. The phone also comes with Magazine unlock option which serves a new wallpaper every time you switch on the display.
Honor has also implemented additional options like one-handed UI, motion control and also dual windows. The phone also has apps like Mirror, magnifiers, flashlight, recorder, FM radio and more.
Honor 5X has fingerprint scanner located on the rear panel and you can configure it from the settings. Other than unlocking the device, you can also use the fingerprints to open apps. This can be configured in the fingerprint settings.
There is also a phone manager app which provides with options like phone accelerator, storage cleaner, call blocked, power saver, traffic manager, do not disturb, app lock and more.
Finally, you can also customize the three on screen buttons but adding a new button or changing the position. Overall, the EMUI is a feature rich UI offering lots of additional options.
Performance:
Honor 5X is powered by a Snapdragon 616 Octa Core processor which is clocked at 1.5Ghz and coupled with a 2GB RAM. In China, the phone is also being sold with a 3GB RAM which is not available in India. We tested the phone performance by using it as a daily driver and found that the UI was quite laggy at times, it took additional second or two to respond to click and even the camera app is very slow. This lag appears system wide and we are guessing this could be an issue with EMUI. The company should have introduced the 3GB variant in India.
The phone also comes with 16GB internal storage which is expandable via micro SD card, an increase from 8GB found on Honor 4X. The storage available in the first boot is around 10.3GB. We tested the gaming performance of this device and found to be quite good with playing high graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 Airborne. The heating on the device was also considerably low even after playing for almost 30 minutes.
Related Watching: Honor 5X Gaming Review
The call quality on the device was quite good and we did not have any issues with dropped calls. The output from the speaker unit was quite decent. The phone also comes with 4G LTE support and dual SIM cards. Since it is not a hybrid SIM card, you can use dual SIMs and also micro SD Card to expand the storage.
Camera:
The Honor 5X comes with a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0, dual tone LED flash and a front-facing 5MP camera for selfies. The camera interface is a functional one with features and modes like Good food, Beauty mode, photos, videos and timelapse.
You can also add filters to the photos before taking them. Additional modes like All-focus, Slow-mo, HDR, Watermark, Panorama, Best photo and Audio note. The phone can record videos in 1080p. The camera app takes good 2-3 seconds to load, so this might not be the camera you would want to use for a quick shot. Honor 5X delivers good results with the photos. They have good detailing and colors are also pretty much vibrant. There is also a delay between the capture and the actual saving of the photos and this results in blurry photos if you move the time when photos are being saved.
The close up captures also came out pretty well. The low light images are decent but they do have noise as the camera tends to over process it. But they are definitely good at this price point. The 1080p video sample was also quite good. The selfie camera does a decent job with photos and quite good for social sharing.
Here are some of the sample taken with the device.
Battery Life:
Honor 5X comes with a 3000mAh battery and the performance is quite good. We tested the battery on 4G LTE network with calls, browsing, a bit of gaming and camera usage along with social apps running in the background and we could get almost a day of battery life.
The phone also comes with Power manager which has different modes to get the best battery life. You can switch between Ultra, smart and normal power saving modes. This setting also shows you the consumption levels for each app. Considering the hardware, we feel this is quite good battery performance. Sadly there is no fast charging included in this device.
Verdict:
If you have been using Honor 4X, then the 5X is definitely a good upgrade with a better quality display, fingerprint scanner, better processor and also camera quality. But where the Honor 5X falls short is the performance with 2GB RAM and EMUI. We wish Honor had launched the 3GB variant in India.
But having said that there are quite a lot of things going for Honor 5X which includes an excellent build, good display, great camera for the price and decent battery life. Although the Honor 5X is slightly priced higher than the competition which includes Moto G3, Le 1S, and Vibe K4 Note, it is definitely a device to look out, for all round performance and Huawei being a trusted brand in India.
