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Pros
Affordable. Attractive metal design. Good camera. Expandable memory and dual SIM slots.
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Cons
Performance issues in testing. Heavy, buggy UI layer.
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Bottom Line
The Huawei Honor 5X is the best looking affordable unlocked phone you can buy, but it's held back by an obtrusive UI and some performance issues.
The Huawei Honor 5X took home our award for
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Design, Display, and Features
The overall design of the Honor 5X resembles the premium HTC One M9, with its brushed metal back and square camera lens. It measures 6.0 by 3.0 by 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.6 ounces, making it a bit bigger and heavier than the Life One X (5.9 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches and 5 ounces). That said, the all-metal build is rare to find at this price, and the 5X really has the feel of a more expensive device.
View All The phone is available in black, gold, and white versions. We received the white model to review, which has a white glass bezel on the front and a brushed silver finish on the back. There are (loud) dual speakers on the bottom edge, a fingerprint scanner on the back, and clicky power and volume buttons on the right. The fingerprint scanner is fast and responsive. There's also a combined nano SIM/microSD slot and separate micro SIM slot on the left. I was able to use a 200GB SanDisk microSD card without any issue.
The 5.5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 IPS LCD is a crisp 401 pixels per inch, the same pixel density you'll find on the Apple iPhone 6s Plus. The display could have been a bit brighter, as visibility isn't great under direct sunlight. That said, you can manually adjusting the color temperature and text brightness to make it more visible in different lighting conditions.
Network Performance and Connectivity
The Honor 5X includes LTE bands 2/4/6/7/12/17, allowing you to use it on AT&T and T-Mobile. Connectivity on both carriers is
Call quality is solid across the board, with good noise
Processor, Battery, and Camera
The phone is powered by a mid-range Snapdragon 616 processor and 2GB of RAM. It's far better than the Snapdragon 410 in the Moto G, but a step below the Snapdragon 617 you'll find in the HTC One A9. Yet despite hardware that looks good on paper, I experienced some performance issues in testing. The phone received an AnTuTu score of 35,200. which is lower than the MediaTek-powered Blu Life One X (37,974). It barely edged ahead in PCMark's Work Performance test, registering a score of 3,699 against the Life One X's 3,599. Simply put, the Qualcomm chip should be performing better.
I saw this average benchmark performance transfer over to general usage as well. The 5X started out snappy, but after installing a few apps like Slack, Spotify, and Twitter, things quickly grew a bit laggy. RAM management is potentially the culprit, as having a single app open, like the default messaging app, eats up 975MB of 2GB. Much of the resource consumption seems to come from background processes, so Huawei's custom skin may be at fault as well (more on that in the next section).
Battery life is solid. The phone lasted for 5 hours and 16 minutes while I streamed full-screen video over LTE at maximum brightness. That's a lot better than the Life One X (4 hours and 4 minutes).
The 13-megapixel rear-facing camera is surprisingly solid for the price. Pictures and video come out sharp in well-lit settings with color reproduction that looks generally true-to-life. Sometimes the auto-exposure struggles and either washes photos out or darkens them too much, but if this happens you can switch over to manual exposure. The 5-megapixel front-facing camera takes decent shots in terms of tone and clarity, and a Beauty Level slider lets you even out your skin tone.
Software, Pricing, and Conclusions
The 5X is running Android 5.0 Lollipop, but Huawei's EMUI 3.1 software layer is designed to make it look more like iOS. There's no app drawer, so all of your apps are arranged on the home screen, like iOS. And most of the stock apps, like the messaging and camera apps, look just like Apple's. Unfortunately, both iOS and stock Android run a lot smoother than EMUI. As mentioned earlier, the UI layer is heavy with background processes, which slows your overall performance down. In addition, I encountered a number of bugs in testing, like apps that frequently force close for no reason at all.
That's not to say that there aren't useful features. There are gesture controls, motion controls, floating docks, navigation bar changes, and a slew of other small customizations you can enable to improve your experience. In addition, there isn't much bloat aside from some pre-installed apps like Facebook and Shazam. You're left with 10.51GB of available storage, which is
The Huawei Honor 5X is supposed to get a future update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which might fix some of its performance issues. But in its current state, it's difficult to recommend over the Blu Life One X, which is $50 less expensive and performs better all-around. The Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 is another solid option for the price. Neither phone looks quite as nice as the Honor 5X, but both offer a more refined experience.
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