Huawei Honor 5X (Unlocked) Review - Review 2022

The Huawei Laurels 5X took abode our award for all-time telephone at CES this year thanks to its attractive metallic build, solid specs, and affordable toll ($199; 16GB). There'southward no doubt the Honor 5X is the best looking unlocked phone you tin get for the money, but we may have been just a bit also optimistic with our initial enthusiasm. While the 5X is a solid phone for the price, it's held back by a heavy, buggy interface layer on top of Android, too as some operation issues in testing. Our Editors' Choice, the Blu Life One X, remains a amend bet.

Design, Display, and Features

The overall design of the Honor 5X resembles the premium HTC One M9, with its brushed metal back and square photographic camera lens. It measures 6.0 by three.0 past 0.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.6 ounces, making it a fleck bigger and heavier than the Life Ane X (five.9 by 2.9 past 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 experience of a more expensive device.

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 dorsum. There are (loud) dual speakers on the lesser border, 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 dissever micro SIM slot on the left. I was able to utilize a 200GB SanDisk microSD card without whatsoever outcome.

The 5.5-inch, 1,920-past-1,080 IPS LCD is a crisp 401 pixels per inch, the same pixel density you'll notice on the Apple tree iPhone 6s Plus. The brandish could accept been a bit brighter, every bit visibility isn't great under direct sunlight. That said, you can manually adjusting the color temperature and text effulgence to make it more visible in different lighting conditions.

Network Performance and Connectivity

The Honour 5X includes LTE bands 2/4/6/seven/12/17, allowing you to utilize information technology on AT&T and T-Mobile. Connectivity on both carriers is strong, though T-Mobile registered ameliorate download and upload speeds in our midtown Manhattan test area. In that location'southward no dual-ring Wi-Fi or NFC, which isn't unusual for phones in this cost range.

Telephone call quality is solid across the board, with practiced dissonance cancellation apart from the occasional crepitation. Earpiece volume is more than sufficient to take calls in noisy environments.

Processor, Battery, and Camera

The phone is powered by a mid-range Snapdragon 616 processor and 2GB of RAM. Information technology'southward 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 adept 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 1 X (37,974). It barely edged alee in PCMark'south Piece of work Operation test, registering a score of 3,699 confronting the Life Ane X's 3,599. Simply put, the Qualcomm flake should exist performing better.

I saw this average benchmark performance transfer over to general usage besides. The 5X started out snappy, merely after installing a few apps like Slack, Spotify, and Twitter, things speedily grew a bit laggy. RAM direction is potentially the culprit, every bit having a unmarried app open up, like the default messaging app, eats upwardly 975MB of 2GB. Much of the resource consumption seems to come from groundwork processes, and so Huawei's custom peel may be at fault as well (more than on that in the side by side section).

Battery life is solid. The phone lasted for 5 hours and 16 minutes while I streamed total-screen video over LTE at maximum effulgence. That'south 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 colour 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 transmission exposure. The 5-megapixel front-facing photographic camera takes decent shots in terms of tone and clarity, and a Beauty Level slider lets you lot fifty-fifty out your pare tone.

Software, Pricing, and Conclusions

The 5X is running Android 5.0 Lollipop, only Huawei's EMUI 3.1 software layer is designed to brand information technology look more than similar iOS. There'due south no app drawer, and then all of your apps are bundled on the home screen, like iOS. And most of the stock apps, like the messaging and camera apps, await just similar Apple's. Unfortunately, both iOS and stock Android run a lot smoother than EMUI. As mentioned before, the UI layer is heavy with background processes, which slows your overall functioning downwards. In improver, I encountered a number of bugs in testing, like apps that oft force shut for no reason at all.

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That's not to say that at that place aren't useful features. In that location are gesture controls, motility controls, floating docks, navigation bar changes, and a slew of other minor customizations you tin can enable to improve your experience. In addition, there isn't much bloat bated from some pre-installed apps like Facebook and Shazam. You're left with ten.51GB of available storage, which is fine, since yous tin ever add a microSD menu.

The Huawei Honour 5X is supposed to get a future update to Android half-dozen.0 Marshmallow, which might fix some of its performance issues. Only in its current state, it's difficult to recommend over the Blu Life 1 10, which is $l less expensive and performs meliorate all-around. The Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 is another solid selection for the toll. Neither phone looks quite as nice equally the Honor 5X, but both offer a more refined experience.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/old-cell-phones/9805/huawei-honor-5x-unlocked-review

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