Honor 5X review - hands on

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 1,920x1,080 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.

We haven't had a chance to put the Snapdragon 616 through our benchmarks just yet, as the original unit Honor provided us with only had an octa-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon 615 chip inside it. However, Honor has confirmed that all European 5Xs will be shipping with a Snapdragon 616 instead. I'll update this review as soon as I've run our usual set of tests, but it should be at least comparable with other Snapdragon 615 handsets I've tested such as the Motorola Moto X Play and the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, if not a little faster. 

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

At £190, the Honor 5X does a lot of things right. It has a decent display, a handy fingerprint sensor and its processor should provide plenty of power compared to the competition. However, there's also the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua to consider, which is slightly smaller than the Honor 5X with an older version of the same chipset, but it takes much better pictures, has a more user-friendly version of Android as well as the added benefit of being waterproof - all for the same price SIM-free. Right now, I'd still err towards choosing the Xperia over the Honor 5X, but I'll bring you my full and final verdict as soon as I've got our final test results and spent a bit more time with the phone.