Huawei’s Honor C series comes with smartphones that are targeted in the low budget segment. The recent phone in this budget was the Honor 5C that is priced at Rs.10,999. The specs are decent but there are a lot of tough competitors in this price bracket. Let us do the Honor 5C hands on review and find out if it is worth buying.
Honor 5C hands on review
Design – 7.5/10
Honor 5C comes with a brushed aluminium finish on the back and has a tough build. On the right, there is the power button, volume rocker while the SIM tray is on the left. Micro USB port is at the bottom along with the speaker grills. The 3.5 mm audio jack is on the top with secondary noise cancellation microphone. On the back we have the camera and the fingerprint sensor. The placement of the components is pretty much common like in the other devices. The phone weighs 156g in weight and has a good one hand grip. The only bad thing about this device in terms of design is the thick bezel on the front. The bezel steals away all the beauty of the phone’s display. This is not the case with its rival Le 2, which has an amazing design. I am not much impressed by Honor 5C in terms of look but the phone’s build is all strong and you can definitely rely on it.
Display – 8/10
Honor 5C has a 5.2 inch full HD display which feels perfect when you hold the phone with one hand. Now there is no Gorilla glass protection on this device so you may need to put on a tempered glass or scratch guard at least. The absence of screen protection on this device is really confusing, but I have been using this device for long now and even with rough usage I had no issues with the screen. The display is vibrant and bright to beat its competitor Le 2 but fails by a thin line when it comes to color reproduction and crispness. The touch works just fine with no issues as such. The 3 navigation buttons are onscreen.
Performance – 7.5/10
Coming to the key feature that is the performance, Honor 5C comes with a Kirin 650 octa-core processor(Quadcore A53 clocked at 2.0GHz + Quadcore A53 clocked at 1.7GHz) which uses the 16nm technology for greater performance and lesser battery consumption. Well, I am not just reading out the lines from Wikipedia but it all proves to be true. It has only 2GB RAM and 16GB internal memory with expandable storage up to 256GB using the SIM slot 2. Now this is one drawback that the phone only has 2GB of RAM, but in actual use the hardware and software performs so great together to mask it. The benchmark score didn’t come out to be good, but the performance is shockingly impressive may be due to the Kirin 650 16nm technology. So for the normal apps and multitasking, you don’t need to worry about. It runs on Mali T830 which also does a good job of running most of the games, but in some games like N.O.V.A. 3 there is a frame drop every now and then. Also, the phone doesn’t heat up much while gaming which is a good thing. If this smartphone had like extra 1 GB of RAM, it would be just unbeatable.
Honor 5C comes with Android 6.0 i.e. Marshmallow running out of the box with EMUI 4.1 running on top of it. It doesn’t have an app drawer, even though I like their UI as it’s pretty clean and simple. There are some default features which you can enjoy like screen recording, scrolling screenshots etc. Plus you can use the fingerprint sensor for multiple things like pulling the notification panel, swipe through photos, attend calls, click pictures etc.
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Camera – 8/10
Honor 5C has an amazing camera quality with 13 MP rear shooter and 8 MP front facing camera. It has single LED which does a decent job. One of the best features of the phone’s camera is the focusing – tap to focus. I was easily able to focus on a spider’s web. Another great feature that you must try is the light painting/graffiti mode. Just put your phone on a tripod, turn off the lights, grab a torch and start painting in the air. It can basically take long exposure shots with added enhancement. I must say that Honor 5C has one of the best cameras in this budget till now.
Scroll at the last for the camera samples
Connectivity and Sound – 7/`10
The phone has Dual nano sim slot with 4G VoLTE support. Other common connectivity options available are Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. One major thing missing is the OTG support and they have also dropped the Gyro sensor. The fingerprint sensor works like a charm on this device and is pretty quick. The speakers on this device are decent too with nice quality and medium audio level output.
Battery – 7.5/10
Honor 5C has a 3000mAh battery and due to the Kirin 650 chipset, it has an amazing battery backup. I could easily last a day with moderate usage over 4G. It doesn’t support fast charging and charges at a normal rate 0-100 takes like 2 and half hours.
Availability and pricing
Honor 5C is available on their official online honor store for Rs.10,999. The color options available are Gold, Grey, and Silver.
