Honor 5X review

Honor’s made some great value budget smartphones in recent years. Last year’s 4X was a decent Moto G contender, and the Honor Holly was surprisingly good for its £90 asking price. Now we have the Honor 5X, which costs £190 but comes with a large 5.5in Full HD display, an octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor, a 13-megapixel camera and a fingerprint sensor.

That’s an impressive spec for a smartphone under £200, and one that overshadows many of its rivals, including the 3rd Gen Moto G. Of course, a 5.5in phone isn’t for everyone, but if you’re after something big for not a lot of money, then the Honor 5X is worth a look.

Design & fingerprint sensor

Its design riffs heavily off the Honor 7, as its square camera, rounded fingerprint sensor and fake material dimple pattern at the top and bottom of the handset look almost identical. However, you can tell the Honor 5X is the cheaper of the two phones as soon as you pick it up, as despite having a full metal unibody, Honor’s sand-blasted finish actually makes it feel more akin to a cheap kind of tacky plastic. Its dimpled, plastic antenna sections also don’t lie flush to the back of the handset, there’s a very slight amount of flex in the screen if you apply too much pressure, and its fingerprint sensor sits just few millimetres too low to be the right height for my finger.

It’s not brilliantly well-made, then, but at least its fingerprint scanner is very quick. It can unlock the phone from sleep in just over a second, putting it neck and neck with Huawei’s Nexus 6P, and it rarely made a mistake even when my finger wasn’t covering the entire sensor. It can also be used to take photos, answer calls, stop alarms and double up as the home or back button depending on whether you hold or tap it.

All these actions work very well, but sliding up on the sensor to show your recent apps and sliding down to bring up the notification panel can be a little more temperamental, as the sensor just isn’t big enough to register these movements accurately. I often had to try these several times before they registered correctly, by which time it would have been much quicker to simply swipe down from the top of the screen or press the onscreen button.

Android & Emotion UI

There’s also Honor’s Emotion UI to contend with, which has to be one of my least favourite Android interfaces. It might be based off Android 5.1.1, but Honor’s interface has more in common with iOS. There’s no app tray, for instance, and as a result of Huawei’s desire to make everything more iPhone-like, the app icons all sit in rounded-off squares, which can be a bit hit and miss depending on which apps you have installed.

Honor’s first party apps look fine, as they’ve all been designed to fit inside its rounded silhouettes, but third-party apps, including most of Google’s apps, often sit awkwardly in the centre with blocks of colour around the sides to fill out the space, and they just don’t look particularly smart.

Admittedly, this can be rectified by downloading a different launcher onto the Honor 5X, such as the Google Now launcher, which reverts the design back to something closer to vanilla Android, but this still doesn’t fix my other main bug-bear with Emotion UI, which is how it separates its notification and settings menus into different tabs when you swipe down from the top of the screen. Not only is it irritating to have to switch between them constantly, but it also doesn’t make very good use of the 5X’s large, high resolution screen. With so much space available, it would have been much more convenient to combine them both into one, easy to use menu instead of only showing one or the other.

Display

Its 5.5in 1,920×1,080 display isn’t the best I’ve seen at this price, but an sRGB colour gamut coverage of 88.9% is by no means terrible. Colours can be lacking in warmth at times, but its high white level of 468.69cd/m2 certainly helps images jump out of the screen, and a contrast ratio of 1,170:1 provides plenty of detail in dark, shadow areas. Its mediocre black level of 0.40cd/m2 could be a bit grey at times, particularly on maximum brightness, but it’s no worse than other phones I’ve tested.

Performance

More impressive is its octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor and 2GB of RAM, as it’s quite rare to see this particular chipset on a phone under £200. Even the 3rd Gen Moto G only has a quad-core Snapdragon 410 inside it, so the Honor 5X provides a significant boost in speed.

In Geekbench 3, for example, it scored a respectable 697 in the single core test and 3,064 in the multicore test, the latter of which is around 500 points faster than other Snapdragon 615 handsets I’ve tested such as the Motorola Moto X Play and Sony Xperia M4 Aqua.

However, I found it was actually quite sluggish in everyday use, and the keyboard in particular was very laggy and unresponsive at times. It also took a turn for the worse when I ran our web browsing test, as its Peacekeeper score of 573 is very much below average compared to other phones with a similar chipset. For the most part, web browsing was relatively effortless, as I was able to browse media-heavy web pages without articles appearing too jerky, but it often stumbled when it came across adverts. Sometimes it ignored my thumb swipes altogether, becoming very slow for a couple of seconds before returning to normal speed again. It didn’t happen very often, but it was still very irritating nonetheless.

The 5X proved equally stuttery when playing games, too, as Hearthstone was often momentarily brought to a halt by character speech bubbles and choosing different cards to attack. This isn’t surprising given its result of 349 frames (or 5.6fps) in GFX Bench GL’s offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test, but simpler games such as Threes! worked much better, so you might be better off sticking to 2D games on the Honor 5X as opposed to power-intensive 3D titles.

Battery life is pretty decent, though, as it lasted 10h 34m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2. This isn’t quite as long as the 3rd Gen Moto G, but it’s still more than enough to get you through the day.

Camera

Its 13-megapixel rear camera was a bit of a mixed bag. Outdoors, it produced some great photos. Colours were a little on the cool side, but there was plenty of detail present across the frame. At full resolution, object outlines could be quite sharp and grainy at times, but it’s certainly not as bad as other smartphone cameras I’ve tested. I was also impressed with its HDR mode, as this brightened up each shot considerably while bringing more contrast into the clouds and surrounding buildings in the frame.

^ The sky is a little overexposed here, but otherwise colours were bright and accurate, and there was plenty of detail present

^ Switching to HDR mode made photos look even better, as the sky had a lot more contrast, and photos were generally brighter overall

Indoors, however, it often struggled to focus, produced soft, rather blurred shots even after multiple taps of the focus ring. There was a fair amount of noise present in lower lighting conditions as well. Thankfully, enabling the bright, neutral flash made pictures appear much sharper, so you’ll probably need to use this at all time when taking photos inside even when there’s lots of light.

^ Indoor shots were much more difficult to take, as the camera struggled to focus correctly even when there was plenty of light available

^ Turning on the flash helped immensely, though, so we’d recommend keeping this turned on at all times when taking pictures inside

Conclusion

Taken together, the Honor 5X just has one too many flaws to warrant a full recommendation. It might be one of the only phones you can buy under £200 with a fingerprint sensor, but for me it still can’t beat the simplicity and superior build quality of the 3rd Gen Moto G. There’s also the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua to consider, which is slightly smaller than the Honor 5X, but has a very similar chipset, takes better pictures and has the added benefit of being waterproof for only £180 SIM-free. In this case, the M4 Aqua is by far the better value smartphone in this price range, but those after something cheaper and more compact should stick with the Moto G.