The Huawei Honor 5X Review: Mid-Range Meets Maturity

Final Words

When you look at the Honor 5X on paper it's impossible to deny that it offers some pretty great specs for its $199 price tag. Of course, specs alone don't make the phone, as they don't always translate into a good real world experience. In the case of the Honor 5X, however, I actually believe that they do. But before making any conclusions it's important to take a look at everything as a whole to see where it excels and where it needs some work.

Design wise, I think the Honor 5X is a solid $199 phone. The best I've seen here previously is plastic done well, and never a metal chassis. That being said, you obviously don't get the same fit, finish, and feel as an aluminum unibody device like the HTC One A9 or the iPhone. At $199 it would be unreasonable to expect that, and what the Honor 5X does provide is more than I would expect from a $199 phone. The metal chassis feels good in the hand, with an interesting mix of a brushed finish on the back and a sandblasted finish on the sides. I'm really not a big fan of the dot pattern on the RF inserts, and they don't align as well as I would like with the rest of the back, but these are fairly minor aesthetic complaints and they don't take away from how the phone feels when you use it.

The Honor 5X performs well for a $200 phone, and at this point there aren't really any big surprises that come with Snapdragon 616. CPU performance honestly isn't any better than the Snapdragon 410 or 615 devices, but the GPU performance is certainly much faster than 410. This is definitely an advantage over devices like the Moto G, which sell for similar prices. The 2GB of RAM also helps to ensure that apps can remain in memory and you don't run into problems like the launcher reloading or apps frequently crashing.

The 1920x1080 IPS display on the Honor 5X is quite good for a $200 device. Something worth mentioning is that it comes with a plastic screen protector pre-applied, which I promptly removed as I'm generally not a fan of any screen protectors. The quality of the LCD is better than I expected, with a much higher brightness than I've seen on any other mid range device, and the sharpness that you'd expect from a 401ppi panel. My only two issues are the fact that it's not calibrated, and the issues with color banding that are made more obvious by EmotionUI's translucency. Going forward, I'm definitely going to need to keep a closer eye on which devices utilize panels with native 8-bit per channel color depth, especially once HDR displays get thrown into the mix. Neither of these are deal breakers, but they're just something to make note of.

The Honor 5X did well in our battery life tests. Roughly ten hours in our web browsing test and over seven hours in PCMark are not scores to scoff at. It also lasts fairly long in BaseMark OS II and GFXBench 3.0, but it also doesn't perform near as well as other devices and I don't think there's much point in running a game at 15fps for four hours.

The camera is not exactly a weak point on the Honor 5X, but one could say that it's a weaker offering than what one would expect from a device with Sony's IMX214 sensor. In my daylight photo scene it's clear that the Honor 5X doesn't produce an output with the same level of sharpness as the Nexus 6 and Moto G. The color balance also seems a bit off, with the scene being shifted further toward blue than it should be. In addition, Huawei has similar problems to ASUS with heavy noise appearing in areas where it really shouldn't be, such as the sky of a photo taken during broad daylight. Since the Honor 5X has a better ISP than the Moto G this really comes down to Huawei's image processing, and it's something they can look to improve with future updates and devices. As for night time photography, it's really a toss up between the Honor 5X and Moto G. The 5X doesn't have the Moto G's chroma noise, but it's also has visibly less detail due to the heavy noise reduction smearing it away.

Finally, there's the Honor 5X's software. From a functional and visual perspective I actually don't mind this version of EmotionUI at all. If you're more of a purist you can always do away with Huawei's launcher, although you are still stuck with their applications and system wide elements like the notification shade. From a performance perspective I think Huawei needs to do a bit more work here. There are areas where the UI becomes really janky, and it's often when there's heavy translucency being used. There's really no point in using a UI that can't run properly with your CPU and GPU, and given the choice, I would take a smoother simpler UI over a complicated sluggish one every time.

While the Honor 5X certainly isn't sluggish in general, the few areas where it is are ones that you end up visiting a bit too often to simply ignore the issues, and I hope Huawei can take a look at the places where performance isn't where it should be and work on optimizing code and altering visuals to bring up the frame rate. I'm told that both EmotionUI 4.0 and Android Marshmallow are expected to show up for the Honor 5X within the next couple months, and those represent good opportunities to improve performance.

In the end the Honor 5X offers you a lot for your money, and so it fulfills its expected role quite well. You get a nice display, good internal hardware relative to the price, a metal chassis, a good fingerprint scanner, and a good camera. For $199 it would be difficult to find a better phone that you can buy as easily and widely as the Honor 5X, with the exception of users who value performance above everything else and would opt for the Zenfone 2. For everyone else looking for a mid-range smartphone, the Honor 5X should be high up on your list.