Honor 5C review

The Honor 5X failed to make much of an impression earlier in the year, but now Honor's back with an even cheaper Android smartphone, the Honor 5C - and with a new octa-core processor at the helm, this budget handset looks like it might just have what it takes to depose Motorola’s £170 Moto G4.

Build quality and design

At just £150 SIM-free, it doesn’t take much detective work to find where Honor has tightened the purse-strings: the 5X’s rear-facing fingerprint sensor has now completely disappeared, and the screen has shrunk from 5.5in down to a slightly more pocket-friendly 5.2in.

Design-wise, though, the Honor 5C doesn’t put a foot wrong. Squint a little and the combination of its smoothly-curved edges and brushed metal rear could pass for a far pricier phone. Get up close, however, and it’s no surprise to find that Honor has had to skimp elsewhere – the rest of the 5C’s frame is cast from plastic, and there are no luxuries such as Gorilla Glass to keep the display safe from harm.

Sadly, first impressions weren't exactly promising, and our review sample showed all the scars of a smartphone that had already had a tough life at the hands of other reviewers. Huge gouges littered its metal rear and scratches were in plentiful supply. On the evidence of this particular sample, you have to wonder if the Honor 5C is actually up to the challenge of surviving in a jeans pocket alongside your keys and loose change.

Performance

There’s no doubting the 5C’s performance pedigree, though. Thanks to the octa-core 2.0GHz Kirin 650 processor and a generous 2GB of RAM, the Honor 5C is a lot more powerful than the 5X, and a good deal faster than the Moto G4, too.

The benchmark scores are seriously impressive for a £150 phone. Scoring 905 in the Geekbench 3 single core test and 3,941 in the multicore test, the 5C surpasses Motorola’s budget champ by quite some margin. Make no mistake, this is one of the fastest budget smartphones I've tested. Unsurprisingly, Honor's Emotion UI Android skin feels super slick and snappy as a result, and I barely had to wait any time at all for apps and menus to load.

It coped well with web browsing, too, as even media-heavy pages such as the Guardian didn't pose much of a problem. It sometimes took a second for it to respond to my thumb strokes when scrolling at speed through dozens of images, but compared to other budget handsets the Honor 5C acquits itself well.

Gaming performance was equally promising. Kirin chips often falter when it comes to running demanding 3D graphics, but the Honor 5C acquitted itself well in the offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test in GFX Bench GL, producing an average framerate of 7.9fps. Granted, that’s still rather jerky, but it's also 20% better than the Moto G4's 6.6fps. That extra horsepower means that demanding games such as Hearthstone run smoothly, and while animations are still a little juddery here and there, it’s still far more playable than you have any right to expect from a budget handset.

Android 6.0 and Emotion UI

One of the Honor 5C's biggest improvements, though, is that it comes with the latest version of Huawei's Emotion UI Android interface, which, at long last, addresses some of the major complaints I've had with it in the past. It's still got some way to go before it beats stock Android (like you'll find on the Moto G4), but its visual improvements are very welcome.

For instance, older versions of Emotion UI used to squeeze all third-party apps into pre-defined squares with rounded corners, often generating extra bits of unsightly background colours to fill in the gaps. You'll still see this on a few apps in the new EMUI, such as Twitter, but the vast majority of them, including the pre-installed suite of Google apps, have transparent backgrounds, which finally brings their design in line with their Android counterparts. It's a small touch, but it makes the phone a lot more pleasant to look at and use on a daily basis.

Sadly, the same can't be said of Emotion UI's drop down menu, as this still insists on separating your notifications and settings shortcuts into two separate tabs. Not only is this incredibly irritating, but it's also entirely unnecessary, as the screen's generous resolution could easily accommodate them both if Huawei merged them together.

Display

Unfortunately, the Honor 5C’s display is easily its weakest point. Its 5.2in, 1,920 x 1,080 panel is a fraction sharper than the slightly larger 5.5in Moto G4, producing a pixel density of 424ppi over the Moto's 401ppi, but the 5C just can't compete on colour accuracy. Photos and images are lacking in warmth, and flesh tones have an obvious yellow tint to them.

Put to the test with our X-Rite colorimeter, it’s easy to see the Honor 5C’s shortcomings. As the display covers only 82.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, the 5C’s cold, tinted colour reproduction is due to the fact that it simply can’t reproduce the most intense hues.

This is a shame, as in other regards the 5C’s display is very promising. For starters, the backlight is astonishingly bright, reaching a maximum brightness of 575.15cd/m2. That's even brighter than the Moto G4, but the 5C’s 991:1 contrast ratio lags significantly behind the Moto G4’s 1,693:1 result. In practice, that means that images lack punch and solidity as black is reproduced as a dark grey. Set side by side with its Motorola-branded rival, the Honor 5C's display struggles to stand out.

Battery life

Naturally, having the screen set to maximum brightness will have a disastrous effect on the phone's already rather poor battery life, so you'll need to dial it down if you want it to last the day. Despite having a 3,000mAh battery at its disposal, the Honor 5C lasted just 9h 27m in our continuous video playback test with the screen brightness set to 170cd/m2 (around half on the 5C's brightness scale). This should just about see you home after a day's work, but even here the Moto G4 once again takes the lead – it managed 13h 39m under the same conditions.

Camera

On the back, you'll find a 13-megapixel camera – the same resolution you'll find on the Moto G4. The 5C's sensor tends to capture rather dark images, but the overall performance is good. Images have a pleasing sense of depth and punch to them, and detail levels are generally very high. It certainly coped very well in cloudy, overcast weather conditions, but I'd recommend using HDR as little as possible, as this had a noticeable impact on contrast and colour vibrancy, resulting in even darker pictures than before.

^ Despite the poor weather conditions, the Honor 5C produced bright, punchy colours with plenty of detail 

^ However, when I switched on HDR mode, picture quality took a massive dive, so use this mode sparingly

Indoor shots pinpointed the Honor 5C’s weaknesses. It struggled to focus correctly in lower lighting conditions, producing soft, hazy pictures that lacked any kind of sharp outline or definition. The fur on the teddy bear in our test scene, for instance, was very smeary, and shadows contained high levels of noise and fuzzy patches of light. This improved when I switched on our studio lights, but colours then became tinged with yellow, making everything look rather off as a result.

^ Indoors, colours looked good in low light, but it struggled to capture a lot of detail

^ Objects became sharper with our studio lights turned on, but colours didn't look nearly as accurate

Conclusion

The Honor 5C excels when it comes to speed, but fails to excel in any other regard. Even its camera, which is arguably the phone's only other strong suit, is rather hit and miss depending on lighting conditions. The biggest issue here, though, is the quality of the competition. When you consider that the Moto G4 costs just £20 more yet comes with a better screen, longer-lasting battery and vastly superior build quality, the Honor 5C simply can't compete.

Buy the Honor 5C now from Vmall