Honor 5X Quick Review

Honor 5X Quick Review

Thanks to Honor for the loaner.

Brief:  An Honourable mid-ranger.

Price:  £190 or US$200.  Three UK contracts start at £13 a month. (N.B. there is presently an extra £20 off available.)

Specifications:  System: Android 5.1 + EMUI 3.1, Memory: Internal: 16 GB / RAM: 2 GB / Slot type: microSD / Max. slot capacity: 128 GB, Display: 5.5" / Full HD IPS / Resolution: 1920 x 1080 pixels,     Camera: 13 Mpixels / Front: 5 Mpixels, Network: 4G: LTE 800/900/1800/2100/2600 MHz / 3G: 900/1900/2100 MHz / GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, Dual SIM Card (Nano & Micro-SIM),     Wireless: Bluetooth: 4.1 / Wifi: 802.11 b/g/n, Connection: Jack 3.5 mm / Micro-USB / Micro SD,     GPS: GPS/AGPS + GLONASS, Sensors: Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor, Digital Compass, Fingerprint sensor, Hall sensor, Proximity sensor, Battery: 3000 mAh, Dimensions: 151.3 x 76.3 x 8.15 mm, SAR Head: 0.56 W/kg, SAR Body: 0.24 W/kg

Accessories:  Charging plug and a micro USB charging cable.

Build Quality:  The construction seems nicely done, however the “metal” back felt cheap, like it was thin plastic painted with metallic paint.  Nothing “bad” and for the money even complaining about the back feels like I’m being petty.

Aesthetics:  Having the gold one may not have helped but I felt the phone takes a better photo than it looks in real life.  Not that it’s bad or ugly but it felt like its overreaching, trying to be an all metal super premium object. However it felt a little bit Ratner’s or Elizabeth Duke.  I would have preferred it was a more honest soft touch plastic.

As a Phone:  Everything worked just as you would expect a phone to.  Calls were good, text and data were fine too.  The CPU was good and while it may not have benchmarked amazingly well it always felt responsive and snappy.  Similarly the GPU, didn’t benchmark great but my go to testing game, Asphalt 8 ran perfectly smoothly however 3Dmark only gave it 177 compared to the ancient Nexus 5 getting 911.  I’m no gamer but it seemed fine to me.  Actually, good is the perfect word for the 5x as everything it did was good.  Nothing amazing, nothing bad.  The camera too was pretty reasonable.  Every aspect was in the good to rather good range, it could do everything and do it well, more than adequately sufficient.  No NFC nor 5GHz WiFi but those were the only things I missed. It’s just simply put a nice device, it does everything and it’s really nicely priced.

Sound:  The speaker, well, meh its fine.  It would cope with the odd Netflix playback in a pinch but not the loudest ever.  The HP out though, well while I had very high hopes for the chipset given how well I liked the Snapdragon 400’s, this I felt was……. just like everything else about the phone.  It was good, perfectly and adequately sufficient.  It was all reasonably even-handed in its presentation and rendition.  It’s all just so very reasonable.  I never found anything that was bad but I never really found anything that would just sing, no earphone pairing nor any musical pairing either.  It was all just fine, perfectly reasonable to listen to but never really captured the spirit of anything.  All so much flavourless and uneventful.  Of course there was nothing I could really complain about given its price and its other attributes but while my head knows that, my heart was rather indifferent to it all.

Value:  Well there is no mistaking that you get a ton of device for the money.  Normally £190 but £170 just now or US$200 in the US.  You just can’t really argue with that sort of value.  It may fall short of super high priced flagship devices in probably every category but…… its one third of their price, if that.  Yet it manages to stay in the realm of competitive in it abilities to them.  So like we’ve see with previous Honor devices, you get a big old heap of phone for a pretty itty bitty price.

Pro’s:  Superbly good value for money.  Superb spec for money.  Price tag.

Con’s:  Aside from value, it just doesn’t excel at anything.  Unexciting.