Huawei’s brand “Honor” has launched their latest smartphone, the Honor 5C in India, which comes as a successor to the successful Honor 4C that did quite well, just like the Honor X series. The main feature for the Honor 4C is the Kirin 600 series 16nm chipset featuring the flagship FinFET Plus technology.
The Honor 5C comes with the Kirin 650 based on 16nm FinFET plus. What does all this mean to the user – This chipset is capable of being smaller and more powerful while consuming less power compared to the earlier chipsets. Now that we are sorted out with the important technical aspects of the 5C, take a look at the specs before you read our views in the review below.
Specifications of Honor 5C:
- Display: 5.2-inch Full HD display with resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels
- Processor: 64-bit octa-core Kirin 650 chipset with FinFet Plus technology and Mali 830 GPU
- RAM and Storage:
- Camera: 13MP rear camera with LED flash, Pro mode, flash capable HDR mode, and an 8MP front facing camera
- OS: Android 6.0 Marshmallow
- Battery: 3000mAh battery with smart power saving 3.0
- Connectivity: 4G LTE, 3G, WiFi, GPS
After using it for quite some time, I will be sharing all my views about the device in this detailed review covering all the aspects of the device.
Design and Build:
On first glance and first feel we can easily know the quality of the build which is sturdy and not one of those light plastic like feeling devices. It comes with an aircraft grade aluminum body with diamond polish and anodized coating which gives it a fingerprint resistant surface. The device feels premium in hand and might feel heavy to some users.
It comes with Volume rockers on the right side of the device, with a 3.5mm jack on top and the micro-USB port at the bottom. The left side houses the Hybrid SIM card slot which supports two nano SIM cards. The camera is positioned in the middle of the device with a slight bump which can be seen and felt and does not let the camera rest flat on its back.
The device comes in three colors Gold, Grey silver and I have been using the Gold color which is quite good looking. The Fingerprint sensor is located on the back of the device below the camera module similar to the Honor 5X. It measures 147.1 x 73.8 x 8.3mm and weighs 156g which is slightly on the higher side.
Display:
The Honor 5C comes with a 5.2-inch LCD Full HD display which comes with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display is crisp with good viewing angles and it particularly looks good thanks to the thin bezels around the display. It comes with 424 PPI pixel density which makes viewing FullHD videos etc in good quality. The viewing angles were good and also the visibility under direct sunlight was decent, but in some situations, the brightness needed to be turned to full to make the display visible.
The touch response was good, the display is a fingerprint magnet and it would be good to go for a tempered glass or a screen guard to keep it smudge free. Overall the display is quite good for the price it is being offered in.
Performance:
The Honor 5C is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 650 chipset which is a 64-bit 16nm chipset manufactured using Finfet+ technology. This is said to make the chipset 65% faster compared to its predecessor and is capable of reaching 300 MBPS speeds, the device comes with Mali 830 GPU which is said to be improved by 100% compared to the earlier model. The Kirin 650 chipset comes with a Quad-core 2.0GHz Cortex-A53 + quad-core 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53. The device comes with 2GB of RAM
I’ve been using the Honor 5C as a daily driver from the past couple of weeks as my primary device, putting it through almost 10-12 hours of browsing, chatting, watching videos, calls and listening to music. Switching between apps like WhatsApp and Facebook or Youtube was smooth without much lag or wait. Let’s talk gaming on this. Not just the moderately heavy games like Temple Run 2, but the Honor 5C was well capable of handling games like Modern Combat 5.
Camera:
The 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, LED flash and manual mode along with an 8MP front-facing camera with F/2.0 aperture are one of the strong points of the device. The Camera App comes with a range of features like manual mode which lets you play around with the ISO, aperture, white balance and even focus using manual settings which appear on the screen when activated is pretty neat.
You get to play around with the settings in Video as well thanks to the Pro Video option which lets you change the focus points, Exposure value, change the AF modes, White Balance etc. These options are pretty impressive for video recording and give you complete control over the result of footage being shot. When coming to the Pro Photo options you get the same options as seen in the Pro Video settings along with options like ISO which is pretty useful if you know what you are doing. One option which caught my eye was the use of Flash in HDR mode which yielded quite good results.
The Camera gives you all the settings which try to do with a DSLR, one such feature is the Light Painting option which helps you capture light trails and time lapse by increasing the exposure time and automatically adjusting to the surroundings, keep in mind that you need a Tripod/monopod to take full use of this feature.
Check Honor 5C camera samples: Link
Once the image is captured you get multiple options to edit the image even little stuff like Watermark can be added from the camera app itself, this camera app is feature packed and you will not be needing any additional 3rd party camera apps for editing etc. One of the major USP of the phone is the camera and if you love to take good photos this camera will not disappoint you and the features are an added bonus.
Battery and Connectivity
The Battery in the Honor 5C has 3000 mAh capacity and it comes with Power Saving 2.0 feature that helps enhance the battery life, but no fast charging support is seen. It gives decent battery life, I could easily get the device to run full day as my primary device. In terms of Connectivity, it supports Dual Nano SIM cards which support 4G LTE and VoLTE as well, connectivity was quite good.
Connectivity was good, in some instances at areas in my house where the signals are usually weak I could find that the Honor 5C was able to get signals and it is most likely due to the dual antenna setup on the top and bottom with the secondary antenna activating automatically when there are weak signals to boost the signal strength up.
Final Verdict:
It is a great device with good build quality and amazing design carrying with nothing new in terms of design but when your earlier design was such there was nothing required to be changed. The Fingerprint sensor is quite fast and accurate, setting it up was easy as well.
The performance was decent and was up to the mark with its competitors without much lag even while multitasking, and you are expecting at lot if you want it to run high-end games as it isn’t a top-end device to see handling anything you throw at it. The camera is the best part of the device with the features and the quality of images it captures is impressive. Let’s be very fair, the Honor 5c does a much better job than the others in its price range when it comes to the cameras.
The software is another big plus and it takes over the device’s hardware because of the big list of features offered by the custom UI.
