Gadgetory

hello everybody is crystal Ora and this is the honor 5x the first honor smartphone for the US market now this phone offers a beautiful and premium design a fingerprint scanner and the 5.5 inch screen all for just $199 now that's a very good deal but let's see if this phone is truly worth picking up let's start with the design of the otter 5x because as you can see the back of this phone is entirely made from this brushed metal which is something you don't see too often from phones in this price range it gives it a very premium look and feel although can be a bit slippery the metal here certainly isn't the most high-grade metal as is easily prone to scratching so you will have to be a little more cautious when handling the phone or setting it down on tables while even the size are made of metal the top and bottom are made from plastic but you won't be able to tell just from looking the volume and power buttons can be found on the right side and they feel very nice with a good amount of tactile feedback they certainly do not feel cheap and with the power button and volume buttons having a textured grippy pattern to them you'll have a very pleasant experience controlling volumes you'll find the headphone jack on the top with the micro USB charging port and speaker being on the bottom it's a pretty light device at only 158 grams and not too thick either at eight point two millimeters also there's a little LED notification light at the top and overall for a $200 phone to support this metallic backing we are very impressed as you power on the display you'll be greeted with a nice 5.5 inch IPS LCD panel at a resolution of 1080 by 1920 and the quality here is actually very good colors are vibrant while not being too oversaturated and without the whites being too warm or too cool you'll notice a back light shining through in darker areas however more so than most LCD panels and there's also a notably large black border around the screen which may be a bit of an eyesore to some people especially if you choose a white front but those are really the only areas where this nice-looking display falls short the display can get very bright giving you no problems outdoors and with a 1080p resolution on this 5.5 inch screen text remains very been clear running this phone is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with an adrenal 405 GPU and 2 gigs of ram with this processing package of course you shouldn't expect this to be the fastest phone on the market but you should expect some really nice performance here however the Snapdragon 615 seems to be a little more sluggish here then we would be used to on other phones that also use it animations will be choppy from time to time and some apps may take an extra second to open there's a bit of a delay when pressing on keyboards and this is also an area where the phone may freeze for a full second or two also when navigating through apps and the recent apps screen expect some app refreshes as well overall though it's not a huge difference compared to other phones powered by the Snapdragon 615 and really these extra stutters may be due to the lack of polish on huawei's emui software Geekbench give the phone a single core score of 700 with a multi-core score of 3165 and tu2 has some lower scores too at only twenty six thousand six hundred and seventy-three as for battery we have a three thousand milliamp non-removable battery inside and I was actually very surprised at how good battery life was on this thing even on a day where I was heavily testing the phone's camera and gaming performance I was able to get six hours of screen on time very impressive if you take advantage of EMU eyes battery saving options that lower CPU and network usage to promote better battery life you'll get some crazy numbers and when using smart mode I was able to get an extra hour of screen on time things start to get interesting with honor 5x when it comes to hardware as we have a fingerprint scanner found on the back like most of Honor's lineup the placement of rear fingerprint scanners has really grown on me over the last couple of months and I do think is the best place for a fingerprint scanner to go when in your hand the device can easily be unlocked without any awkward Hamden asacs whichever way you may hold your phone your finger is always going to be ready to tap that scanner but what makes the scanner great is the fact that you don't need to first push the power button to have the scanner begin reading once your finger makes contact with the scanner whether the screen is on or off your print will be red and fast too although not as fast as the Nexus 6p it gets very close and is very reliable it's awesome to see a fingerprint scanner on such a cheap phone especially one of this quality since your pointer finger is always resting on or near the enter it makes sense to have the scanner serve additional purposes and that's exactly what it does with gestures so swiping up shows a recent apps screen a tap will take you back and tapping and holding takes you home and you can even answer calls stop alarms and take photos with the scanner so Iping down on the fingerprint scanner pulls down the notification page which is very helpful given how hard it is to reach the top of this 5.5 inch screen is definitely a feature that I've gotten into the habit of using and I know when I switch to another phone I'm going to be sad to see it go with such a fast and reliable fingerprint scanner full of useful gestures I'd have to say this is definitely one of the best ones on the market right now the speaker is placed on the bottom right so it can easily be covered up when gaming or watching videos which is unfortunate but is even more unfortunate is its sound quality which is very muffled and almost seems too started even at lower volumes when it comes to storage you only have one option at 16 gigs which is pretty small but forgivable since the honor 5x allows for microSD card expansion up to 128 gigs this phone also features dual SIM cards for micro SIM cards or nano SIM cards the honor 5x is running android 5.1.1 out of the box however there's a heavily skinned emui 3.1 which is a norm for all of Honor's lineup this will probably split a lot of users and may actually be a deal-breaker for some it's not bad but with a lack of an app drawer being one of the more questionable decisions it can really make users feel limited with their customization you're going to have to resort to folder making which can still not look the greatest and can take a lot of planning and time but there's nothing stopping you from during a launcher on here to change your homescreen there's also some silly features that show up sometimes like consumption reminders which warned you about apps consuming too much power even though most of the time you see these pop up right after actually using the app the recent apps screen looks something similar to an older kick head version of Android and even with this harsh reskin some stock Android features shine through ever so often like with the emojis that have been unaltered not all of this reskin is bad Bo the Notification pulldown is very well organized into two parts one for notifications and one for shortcuts this saves a lot of room allowing for lots of notifications to be displayed at once a Mui 3.1 really shows a lot of detail here too if you do need to get into shortcuts a simple swipe to the left will do and if you think about it this rescan saves a lot more room than you'd be used to on stock Android with this timeline on the Left showing exact times for received notifications you'll feel very organized if the lack of an app drawer isn't a big concern for you you decide to stick with emu eyes home screen you do have a lot of customizable options as well like themes transition animations homescreen grid and even fun features like shake to realign icons and auto align this software definitely is going to turn a lot of users away which is unfortunate as there's nothing stopping Huawei from slapping a more slimmed down version of Android on to the 5x but at the same time a lot of users will have a lot of fun with all the extra features however while way states that the 5x will receive regular software updates including marshmallow emui 4.0 and Android security patches in a timely manner which is great to hear and in fact they have already released this most security update before the phone was even released so it seems they are indeed keeping their word now we get into the camera and with this 13 megapixel sensor aperture of 2.0 and lack of optical image stabilization the quality is more the same you would find on the majority of phones in this price range in optimal conditions like outdoors the camera performs to the best of its ability and really looks nice pictures tend to have a lot of softness to them without any type of post processing or sharpening going on sure we would have liked to see just a bit more sharpness to these images but pictures still seem clear the color temperature seems to be more towards the warm side and colors appear to like the punch of vibrancy as well and lots of the time areas of photos will be overexposed however these issues are very minor and overall the camera takes pleasing pictures HDR is there for brightening up the shadows and it does a great job although sometimes it will just make the overall picture brighter which results in a worse picture as you move into nighttime shots the camera will try to compensate for the lack of light by increasing the shutter speed and without optical image stabilization photos come out slightly blurry for a front-facing camera pictures look pretty decent although with some extra noise but once again indoors photos will be a lot less sharp with lots of noise you can shoot 1080p although you'll have to toggle it on in settings and it can be pretty shaky and exposing is also an issue here as well it tries to correct the exposure very rapidly with harsha's myths that can be distracting there are some extra features in video mode as well like slo-mo and object tracking which is actually pretty cool you can touch the object you want to focus on and the camera will then track and focus on to that object no matter where you move so yes the camera definitely has a lot of room for improvement but this is a two hundred dollar film that we've been talking about here and for that price you really can't complain so is this phone worth picking up for $200 I would without any hesitation say yes of course it's a great Buy this is the only phone you can purchase at the moment in the US that has a metal design and a fingerprint scanner for $200 these are features you would usually find on more high-end phones that can cost anywhere from 400 to 700 dollars these two things alone make this phone a bargain but on top of that you have a large 5.5 inch screen and feature-packed operating system yes it's marketed as a budget phone so of course you shouldn't expect the fastest and smoothest software experience my biggest gripe with the phone and I know a lot of you guys would agree is the lack of an app drawer but once you slap a custom launcher on top you'll have an awesome time using this premium feeling budget phone alright guys that's all I have for this review thanks for watching and if you want a more in-depth look go check out our website and rotatory calm for the written article and other cool things like camera samples screenshots of the UI benchmarks and more also check out these other cool videos on this side here and click on that Google Play link up there for our new and improved Android authority app and like I said head on over to our website Android Authority calm as we are your source for all things Android