Gadgetory

it's been unboxed we've shared our second impressions and we've compared it to another budget-friendly phone but now we need to wrap up our time with this inexpensive aluminum handset can any company make cheap stylish there's only one way to find out I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's our full review of the Huawei honor 5x walking around the hardware we've got a collection of specs which would have been high-end flagship territory around three years ago the 5.5 inch 1080p IPS display is respectably bright and easily viewed in outdoor light a 1080p on the screen size is plenty capable for accomplishing your daily smartphone tasks it's a great screen at this tier of the market especially when being used at reasonable distances from your face and it only suffers in situations where magnification is involved like sitting in a VR headset above that screen we've got a respectable 5 megapixel front-facing camera and the whole affair is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 bytes of RAM and there's 16 gig of built-in storage with the option to add more via microSD card that's always a help as after formatting and partitioning users will really only have access to around 10 gig my standard collection of apps and services has grown to around 4 gigabytes of storage so 16 gig phones are starting to feel really claustrophobic without the ability to move files to an SD card unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any USB OTG support for external storage or audio devices the right side holds a power button and volume rocker borrowing' button placement from some of my past favourite phones power under the volume rocker and both are easily reached without dancing the phone around in my hand the left side of the phone is where we'll find a pair of pin tool doors to access sim and SD cards the bottom edge has a pair of vents but the honor only has one loudspeaker a somewhat unimpressive performer while it's loud enough for alerts when in your pocket music movies and games sound hollow at best and shrill at worst the rear of the phone holds a 13 megapixel main camera and a fantastic fingerprint scanner we'll talk about both in more detail later in this review this look is familiar with some design accents seemingly borrowed from other popular phones which stops just shy about right copying rivals the rear casing is a lovely brushed aluminum with a subtle curve to the plate and nicely machined edges tapering to prevent any corner from feeling too sharp the front is basically a Samsung - the home button forehead and chin bezels feel larger than they might need to be but the screen - front face ratio is over 70% which is my threshold for getting cranky so I'll bite my tongue there it's an attractive phone at any price point but our review unit did suffer from a few seams which weren't pieced together very well in a small blemish on one bottom corner which looks like it could have come from a drop or lacks QA when manufacturing none of these issues impacted our ability to use the phone but I did find myself often absent mindedly running my thumb over some of those seams this camera has a respectable 1/3 inch sensor with a maximum resolution of 41 60 by 31 20 or 12 point nine million effective pixels and an aperture of f2 this phone software the camera app is obviously inspired by the iPhone we have the same sliding action to move between photo and video modes and the upper right corner of the app is home to a collection of filters which I refused to use we don't have the ability to save raw output but we can adjust white balance in ISO not quite the same in-depth manual options at big brother Huawei fund receive and these options are buried in the settings menu but we can tweak exposure a little we also have a great collection of options for post-processing our shots before the camera creates a JPEG file dial back some saturation or increase contrast it's all good while sensor size and resolution are similar to what we might find in the current iPhone actual performance and output won't quite reach what the 6s can produce which really shouldn't come as a surprise given that the honor 5x costs 1/3 what Apple charges for the iPhone 6s overall we produced a healthy collection of shots with punchy colors and decent dynamic range for this tier the better the light you have the better you can harness it the better your photos will be so I've always thought it's silly when reviewers say things like well in good light you'll get good photos it's kind of like saying your car is really fast when you floor it going down a steep hill but I digress in good light you'll be able to take advantage of faster shutter speeds and you should produce pleasing images weather was uncharacteristically cloudy over the last couple days in LA so moving the shaded shots I'm happy to see that the white balance isn't too aggressive and color tone and hue stay appropriately warm indoor lighting situations start taxing this hardware though ISO starts climbing and detail starts to degrade through longer shutter speeds and more aggressive noise reduction the single LED flash will help fill in closer setups but it's not a particularly powerful spotlight night shots also exhibit the same image degradation but the camera responds well to different hues of street lights like this creepy gate where the color temperature here does a great job reflecting the ugly yellow light illuminating this white gate macro performance is also respectable getting to about two inches away from the lens for some nice close-up shots but this 1/3 inch sensor means we won't see that really pretty background blur which more expensive phones with half-inch sensors can produce for an inexpensive handset we do have a few fun features beauty mode for our selfies for example turns me into all kinds of plastic but I'd happily trade this beauty mode position for the HDR panorama modes both of which are very good for a phone at this price HDR still takes on a bit more of a shadow brightening mode and won't always pull in highlights but you'll get a bit more color pop out of it the panorama mode processes quickly and does a great job of stitching elements together in your shot you'll rarely see seams as long as you give the phone a slow and consistent pass video largely mirrors photo performance in terms of color and exposure but this Qualcomm is processing a pretty low bit rate a 20 megabit per second data rate means we'll be looking at dull colors and contrast and blurrier details thankfully the frame rate never dropped below 30 frames per second night shots might come out a bit dark but they won't suffer from the streakiness we might see from cameras that drop down to 20 frames per second the audio also suffers from slow and aggressive noise reduction the beginning of each clip will spike in volume and is then reduced to a warbling dull fog of background sound lastly without any kind of image stabilization that I can find the video here will be functional but unimpressive while audio performance from the bottom firing speaker isn't particularly impressive headphone playback is refreshingly punchy I'm not aware of why way using any fancy branded solutions for their headphone audio but it's loud and bacey the EQ color here is a bit aggressive for my taste with that bass there's also a bit of a presence bump for highs and that can sometimes sound brittle electronica and hip-hop sounded full classic rock started to lose some of the fun distortion on guitars in the mids but jazz and classical suffered the most in losing detail and clarity around acoustic instruments still this was better headphone performance than I was expecting especially after listening to the speaker moving the software we're running android 5.1.1 lollipop which has been skinned with Huawei's emui custom launcher the general idea is to pack LG or Samsung style features while providing the organization scheme of iOS we've seen quite a few of these options on other handsets motion control settings allow you to mute calls by flipping them over if your home screens weren't messy enough you can shake the phone to rearrange them there is a tap to wake feature which doesn't work quite as well as the fingerprint scanner and while the screen is off drawing the letter on the display will launch an app directly but this feature doesn't clear the lock screen so I'm not sure how useful this will actually be drawing ac for camera lands you here when double tapping the volume rocker will actually get you into the camera rearranging the bottom navigation bar a la LG is greatly appreciated with the option to add a notification panel icon though I do kind of like the fingerprint sensor swipe better for pulling my notifications as for navigating the device I didn't like this user interface while unboxing the phone I didn't like it during my second impressions and I still don't like it now we see a concerted effort to pay homage to the iPhone throughout this UI your app drawer and home screens are the same thing which leads to a really cluttered scattering of shortcuts and at a glance notifications from widgets the divided notification shade doesn't feel like any other Android I've used and the phone can be a bit naggy in how it alerts you to updates I don't understand the strategy if I'm being honest if I wanted an iPhone I would get one at least on Android we can install an they're launcher like Google now or Nova but I actually spent half of my time using this phone in simple mode just to avoid this mess of an interface while the honor software is a bit of a mess the phone is a capable performer you'll rarely be kept waiting for the phone to catch up to homescreen slides or menu scrolling and over the last week I only had one bad redraw of the homescreen which I couldn't capture on camera the Qualcomm 6-1-6 handles daily tasks easily and it only gets bogged down in aggresive multitasking or when playing games with intense graphics Skyforce and Riptide gp2 performed well but Marvel future fight often becomes a slideshow of your favorite superhero wasting bad guys the most impressive part of this whole equation though is Huawei's terrific fingerprint scanner quickly unlocking the device it's faster than most power or home button mounted solution in the training process does a great job of reading prints even when you're turning significantly from how you trained the phone it really is a shining gem of a feature - included a phone at this price point it's also exciting to see more phones combining low-power processors with larger batteries the 3000 milliamp hour cell here is good for all-day operation under medium to heavy workloads and my best run managed just over 5 hours of screen on time using auto brightness and a healthy mix of Wi-Fi performing a playback test streaming 30 minutes of HD video over Wi-Fi at 50 percent brightness resulted in 7 percent battery draw which is really good when compared to flagships with more powerful guts and smaller batteries the battery capacity comes in handy as the honor doesn't seem to use any fast charging that I could find I was only able to charge the phone about 20% after an hour on a proper two amp quick charger my car charger kept the phone battery in place while I was using the wall way for turn-by-turn navigation and streaming podcasts so where's that leave us with the Huawei honor 5x this is a slick budget-friendly mid Ranger and there's a lot to like here for the savvy or folks in our audience a few simple software tweaks can really step up with this hardware has to offer though I'm a bit torn on whether to recommend this for people who aren't at the same level of tech awareness I think people coming from a more traditional Android device will be frustrated by this UI and I think folks coming from an iPhone will just see this as being a cheap knockoff what is exciting though is watching huawei step up unlocked offerings here in the United States with some killer options at a variety of price points above all I'm always going to be happier when there's more competition at all product tiers the honor 5x raises the bar for inexpensive phone design and security and now we'll get to see how competitors respond will 2016 be the year of the mid-range er can less expensive phones pull market share away from flagship devices I'm sure you have thoughts on the honor 5x so I hope you'll share them down in the comments as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews like this and hit that thumbs up button to help us out with a little positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos back now you can chat me up on Instagram and Twitter as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review you