Prestigio Grace X5 review

Compromise is usually to be expected on a budget smartphone, particularly when it comes to photography credentials. If you’re lucky, you might get an 8-megapixel sensor, but more often than not you’re landed with a murky 5-megapixel camera that feels more token addition than must-have feature. The £105 Prestigio Grace X5 bucks that trend. It has a massive 13-megapixel rear sensor, which should let you to take high-resolution photos without paying flagship prices.

Unfortunately, the quality of the pictures it takes leaves much to be desired, as even in bright, clear sunshine our pictures looked extremely hazy and large portions of our test shots were lacking in any kind of fine detail. The brickwork on nearby buildings, for instance, was almost completely unrecognisable, as each individual brick had blurred into a single mass of pixels. Window reflections also produced a bright blurry sheen across the picture, making it look as though the colours had blurred across the image.

Turning on HDR mode didn’t help matters either. You’re warned not to move the handset while taking HDR shots, but whereas other budget phones seem to be able to account for a little bit of handshake, the Grace X5 couldn’t cope with it at all. Instead, areas toward the edge of the frame were extremely jerky where the camera had combined the two exposures, and it didn’t help correct the blurry haze we found in Auto mode either.

^ Despite having a 13-megapixel sensor, the photos we took on the Grace X5 were very hazy and lacked a lot of detail

^ Turning on HDR mode helped correct the level of contrast, but lighter objects were still very blurry

This is disappointing, but at least the handset itself is well-made for the price. Measuring 137x68x8mm and weighing 137g, it’s one of the better-looking budget phones we’ve seen recently. We particularly like its rear textured chassis that’s available in either blue or white. This provides a welcome level of grip and the phone’s rounded corners make it very pleasant to hold.

PERFORMANCE AND BENCHMARKS

The Grace X5’s performance is also decent for the price. Its quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6582M processor and 1GB of RAM were a little sluggish while web browsing, as media-heavy pages tended to stutter a bit while scrolling, but it was quick enough to run Android 4.4 smoothly.

However, there are other cheap handsets, such as the 2nd Gen Moto E, which are noticeably faster. For example, the Grace X5 scored just 872 overall in our BrowserMark tests, which is a long way behind the Moto E’s 1,169. The Grace X5 also trailed behind in our BaseMark OS II tests, scoring 353 compared to the Moto E’s 488.

Likewise, the Grace X5 struggled with our 3D gaming benchmarks, as its score of 4,909 in BaseMark X 1.1’s Medium quality graphics test averaged to a crawling 7.3fps in the Dunes test and 11.8fps in the Hangar test. You’ll still be able to play simple 2D games like Candy Crush, though, so you won’t be at a complete loss when you’ve got spare minutes to kill.

DISPLAY

The Grace X5’s 4.7in, 1,280×720 resolution screen was a little flawed as well, as we were expecting more from its IPS panel. Whereas most IPS screens tend to cover around 96% of the sRGB colour gamut, the Grace X5 only managed 87%. Its weakest area was its warm colour coverage, as this fell quite short of the sRGB colour boundary. This resulted in slightly cooler looking images, and even the colourful home screens didn’t look particularly rich or vibrant.

Contrast levels, on the other hand, were much more promising, as we measured a ratio of 893:1. This gave images plenty of detail, but the screen’s viewing angles did tend to drop off when we tilted the phone to the side. This means you have to be looking at the phone more or less straight on to get the best picture, which isn’t particularly useful if you’re outside trying to combat reflections.

The screen is reasonably bright, though, measuring 318.45cd/m2, so you still be able to see it clearly in bright sunshine. We were also pleased with black levels, which measured 0.35cd/m2. This is around average for a smartphone display, so text should be just as easy to read as more expensive handsets.

BATTERY LIFE

Battery life was a little underwhelming, but this it to be expected when it only has an 1,800mAh battery. With the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2, the Grace X5 lasted 8h 7m in our continuous video playback test. This should be enough to get you through the day with light use, but it pales in comparison to the Moto E’s battery life of 13h 30m under the same conditions.

ANDROID

Another minor disappointment is that the Grace X5 still runs Android 4.4 KitKat rather than Google’s newer Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system. While KitKat isn’t a bad operating system, the Grace X5 can’t help but look a little old-fashioned by comparison when the 2nd Gen Moto E, for example, comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop straight out of the box.

Prestigio also burdens the Grace X5 with quite a lot of bloatware and pre-installed apps, so you’ll probably want to spend a bit of time removing these so they don’t clog up your app tray and main home screen. We could do without the irritating Prestigio start-up noise whenever we turned the phone on as well, as the only way to get rid of it was to put the phone on silent.

CONCLUSION

Startup noises aside, the Grace X5 is a well-made but ultimately mediocre handset that doesn’t stand up to the competition. The camera is a particular disappointment, as even the 2nd Gen Moto E‘s 5-megapixel camera produces more detailed images than the 13-megapixel sensor seen here. The Grace X5 does have a few advantages over the Moto E, namely its larger, higher-resolution screen and the fact that it’s £5 cheaper SIM-free, but we still think the Moto E is better value, as you not only get the most up to date version of Android, but you also get a better battery life and faster performance. If you need something more powerful then check out our Best smartphone picks and buying guide.