What’s goin on guys, Jerry Neutron here and today we’re taking a look at another low budget smartphone. This is the Honor 5X from the China based company, Huawei. At just $200 bucks it doesn’t get much cheaper than this but what exactly are you getting for the price?
Well for starters, you get a solid aluminum frame with this kind of brushed metal finish on the back and the phone feels pretty good in hand, its got a nice weight to it. It’s definitely nicer than I was expecting considering the pricepoint. And it looks good too, it’s got sort of that One M9 vibe going on but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, well unless you’re a patent troll.
If you like big phones you’ll be happy to know that you get a 5.5″ 1080p IPS display which is sharp, it looks good from all angles, the backlight shines through evenly, it’s not as nice as an AMOLED display that you get on phones like the OnePlus X but all things considered I can’t really complain.
Another thing I can’t complain about is the battery life. So with the Honor 5X you get a 3000 mAh battery which translates into just under 4 hours of screen-on time at 100% brightness. But the 5X isn’t getting there through brute force, there’s actually a Phone Manager included with EMUI which closes apps or disables things that may be consuming battery life to ensure you’re getting maximum usage out of the phone. Now if you’re someone like me who likes to manage these things yourself this can sometimes be a bit of an annoyance but if all you care about is getting maximum battery life then you will definitely enjoy this feature.
So in addition to Huawei packing in some of it’s own apps it’s important to mention that the Honor 5X is also running a heavily skinned version of Android 5.1.1. EMUI looks very much like an iOS clone with its rounded icons and lack of an app drawer and personally I’m not a huge fan. It didn’t take long for me to install Nova launcher to bring back a little bit of that Android feel as well as speed up the animations to make the phone feel snappier.
And that helped a little bit but I still experienced slowdowns from time to time which we can likely attribute to the 2GB of RAM.
As for the rest of the hardware, you get a Snapdragon 616 processor, Adreno 405 GPU, 16GB of on-board storage with a micro SD slot, a micro USB 2.0 port – no quickcharging because the device only comes with a 1 amp charger, along with a single bottom firing speaker and a fingerprint sensor on the back that is about on par with the Nexus offerings. Also as a quick mention you do get 4G LTE support with this device but no 5GHz WiFi support.
Moving on to the cameras, the Honor 5X has a 5 megapixel front facing camera and a 13 megapixel main camera with an f2.0 aperture and 28mm lens. Photos through the main camera came out pretty well, as long as the scene was well lit and you weren’t capturing any motion. The camera app has special modes like a Good Food mode for example to enhance your photos even further. But if you’re trying to capture a moving object or something in low light, well good luck because it’s gonna take you several tries as you’ll likely come out with a blurry image on the first couple of attempts.
Also can’t forget about the video side in which you get up to 1080p recording at 30fps.
All in all though I’d say the camera is about on par with other devices in it’s price range.
So to wrap this all up, the Honor 5X is definitely overachieving for $200 bucks. It’s got great battery life, a nice display and solid build quality however for an extra $50 I’d personally go with the OnePlus X. It has an even nicer display and build quality as well as slightly snappier performance thanks to an extra gig of RAM and the near-stock Android experience.
I know some people don’t like small phones though so if you do prefer a larger form factor or you want that extra 45min. of screen-on time then go ahead and stick with the Honor 5X.
So those are my thoughts, let me know what YOU think down in the comments below. Feel free to give this video a like if you enjoyed this type of content, subscribe if you haven’t already and until next time…see ya!
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