Ratings: ****
Price: Rs 12,999
+ Nice design, high quality 1080p screen, good performance, a good all-rounder
- Gets beaten in the value and performance stakes by competition, has a bunch of pre-loaded appsWe recently reviewed the Huawei Honor 7. Priced at Rs 22,999, that is in a different league with altogether different competition. The Honor 5x though, wants to take as much mojo from the Honor 7 as possible while keeping the price a whole lot lower.
So it's an attractive but generic design - thankfully it's all metal which seems to be the flavour of the season in the price range. We reviewed the gold, which is nice to look at: it includes a brushed metal back panel that curves toward the edges, chamfered edges and a gold front panel too. The back panel is home to a bunch of declarations/text in large font which is unsightly.
It also has the camera lens, dual LED flash and square fingerprint scanner. These are getting better all the time and we really can't complain - the speed and accuracy are both great. You can use your finger print to wake/unlock the phone in a split second, to access the safe or to access app lock. There are also a bunch of touch gestures you can do with the fingerprint scanner - if enabled, anyone can perform these gestures, not just the owner.
These include its use as a camera shutter, touch and hold for home, to answer an incoming call, stopping an alarm, sliding up to show recent apps or sliding down to show notifications.
The screen is a nice 1080p unit with good brightness, nice colours and excellent viewing angles. It's nice to see that there's no compromise here. Performance with day-to-day usage is good with no stutters and it handles multimedia and web like a champ. Power users will reach the performance limits of the 616 fairly soon with games and very heavy apps. The camera is also good but not exceptional.
You get good results in most conditions with noise levels kept under check. As for the software features - there's a handy phone manager app with lots of functions.
It will optimize the device, speed up performance and clean up trash/junk. It can keep track of data usage, manage all your notifications in one place, a call/SMS blocker, do not disturb filter and app lock (individual apps can be locked with a PIN). Head over to the settings page and there's a bunch of things you can configure. There's a standard or a simple home screen style (with large icons), many display adjustments (colour temperature, fonts, indicator light, network speed), gesture controls (double tap to wake, draw to open apps, flip to mute etc) and onehand UI.
From the lockscreen, you can swipe up to reveal a control panel with access to the voice recorder, flashlight, calculator and camera. Lockscreen wallpapers can change each time you power on. And you can have two apps side-by-side if you like (press the recent apps button down for a couple of seconds). All these features are part of the Emotion UI (EMUI) by Huawei. It's not a 'light' interface by any standards so some may want to ditch it in favour of a light launcher.
So the Honor 5x ticks the right boxes for the price range but newer entrants like LeEco Le 1s are proving very popular by offering a lot more than the 5x for a significantly lesser price - but they're only sold in flash sales. The 5x is what you would get once you get fed up of flash sales and need a solid, dependable performer for a nice price.
Source: Honor 5X review: Can't match up to competition
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