Hands On with the Honor 5X

Huawei’s sub-brand Honor launched the Honor 5X in India. The successor to the Honor 4X made its debut in China earlier this month after its unveiling at CES 2016.The Honor 5X is priced at Rs 12,999 with preorders starting yesterday and sales starting from February 1 on Amazon and Flipkart.

In terms of design, the Honor 5X sports an aircraft-grade metal unibody construction with a fingerprint scanner at the back that promises 0.5 seconds unlocking time and can also be used to capture photos. The device gives a premium look for a budget-friendly smartphone, keeping it on par with the Le 1s that was launched last week. These devices show us that budget phones are turning out to be the new premium.

The Honor 5X sports a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS LCD display with a 1920 x 1080p resolution, and a pixel density of 401 ppi. It is powered by a 64-bit octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC with Adreno 405 GPU. The 5X is available in 2GB of RAM options with 16GB onboard storage that is expandable up to 128GB via microSD card slot.

On the camera front, the Honor 5X gets a 13MP primary camera with f/2.0 aperture and dual tone LED flash and a 5MP selfie shooter. Both the rear and front cameras are impressive and fast, especially when shifting focus. The colors are a touch darker than the actual setting which helps in capturing blacks well. The shutter is on the slower side as well.

Connectivity options include Bluetooth 4.1, USB 2.0, GPS, A-GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and 4G (Dual SIM). The device gets its juice from a 3000mAh battery pack with Smart Power 3.0. The handset runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop which is upgradable to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The Honor 5X does have a premium look, and the metal unibody construction does well to add to that. However, it fails to grab our attention when compared to LeEco’s Le 1s, which was launched last week at Rs 2000 cheaper at that.

The UI isn’t as snappy and fluid as one would hope, especially in its initial usage, which may put off a lot of buyers. It takes a couple of seconds before the Gallery or Camera apps open.