Huawei Honor 5X Review: A badass phone that could have been better!

04| Camera Quality

The Huawei Honor 5X sports a 13MP camera sensor compromising on OIS. In my opinion the camera is pretty good but at times taking pictures fastly without giving it much time could have the blurring effect on your photos. Nonetheless, this is an awesome contender. Feel free to click on the images to view them in full size. Here’s a few shots:

Here’s a video sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owc0CFuqn3M

Do notice me trying to focus my finger. It does not wanna autofocus on it unless I touch it which is pretty normal. But I tried to give it a go!

05| Performance and Battery Life

Please do note that the Huawei Honor 5X comes in two variants, a 3GB RAM version paired with the new Snaprdragon 616 which is much better and efficient. They one we are reviewing today is the 2GB variant with the Snapdragon 615.

The performance and battery life is what saddens me the most about this phone. The phone sports an Octa-Core Snapdragon 615 CPU paired with 2GB of RAM. Out of all the CPUs they went with a Snapdrgon 615? Well I won’t call it bad. But this thing heats like a volcano when using it on charge. Yes I know I shouldn’t be using it. But its a common practice to use a smartphone while its charging.

Okay, let’s first cover about the performance of this device. The smartphone is handles almost any general task with ease. Running throughout the UI was an awkward situation I noticed frame drops at times during animations. Even typing on this keyboard was very annoying, even after I switched to Google Keyboard. Overall most of the rest of the UI seemed smooth enough. And yeah this device will soon get the taste of Android 6.0 Marshmallow which has been confirmed on Twitter by Huawei. Yes, playing games seems to be fine here. I tried to play Asphalt 8 on High and it ran it totally fine, sure its not your PCMR 60FPS but yeah I could notice occasional lags throughout the game. Playing this game on medium was a very enjoyable experience. As of the benchmark scores, here are some numbers

Okay now that the benchmark numbers are cleared, let’s talk about the battery life. Here’s a few data I gathered. For me I think the battery life could have been better. But you can decide if the battery life is okay for you.

• Watching a 30 minute YouTube video in Full HD resulted in a 20% decrease in the battery. Which means It’ll take 1.5 hours continuous usage of YouTube Videos to suck up your full battery
• Playing Asphalt 8 for 20 minutes resulted in a 12% decrease in battery life.. Which means it’ll take around 1.5 hours to drain your battery
• Browsing 6 minutes Google Chrome for half an hour resulted in a decrease of 2%. Which means it’ll take 5 hours of continuous browsing to deplete your battery completely
• Charging this phone from 30% to 100% took me about 3 hours and 45 minutes.

06| Pricing and Conclusion

The Huawei Honor 5X sure is one of the phones to be on your list in the market. The phone has an SRP of RM899 in Malaysia. Huawei has bashed a hard competitor in the market that surely shows that you could get an excellent phone at a low price. As of the variant I received is the 2GB RAM with the Snapdragon 615. There’s also a 3GB RAM with Snapdragon 616 which costs a bit more, but will hopefully solve a lot of the issues here with the 2GB variant I reviewed here today.