Huawei’s Honor 5C is pretty decent for a budget-priced smartphone, writes Hanna Sheikh Mokhtar
AT first glance, I was impressed with the look and feel of the Huawei Honor 5C. The phone comes in a sleek metallic design, with smooth rounded corners. The metallic gold body gives it an air of premium quality, and it feels solid without weighing too much.
Powered by Huawei’s home-brewed HiSilicon Kirin 650 chipset coupled with 2GB RAM, the Honor 5C comes with 16GB of internal storage. It features a 5.2-inch Full HD display, a finger-print sensor and runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow out-of-the-box. The Honor 5C sports a 13MP rear camera and an 8MP front camera, and houses a 3,000mAh non-removable battery.
MY TAKE
The Honor 5C left a good impression on me. The camera gives a superb performance — both rear and front camera alone would be able to justify the price of the phone. Except for optical image stabilisation (OIS), you will get all the features that you can expect on a good camera phone here.
Colour saturation, as well as detailing are really nice in the resulting photos. It has a Pro Mode that can enhance your camera quality — it’s like having a pocket DSLR within this price range. The only problem I seem to find with the camera stems from the positioning of its rear camera. It is a little bit high up at the back panel so one has to be careful or it will get scratched.
The Kirin 650 octa-core processor handles applications (such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even the camera) like a pro without lagging. However, if you attempt to multitask with some high-graphics games (like Asphalt 8 and Nova 3), the game would probably start over. There was also no heating problem. Even after playing YouTube videos for five hours continuously, I could still hold the mobile in my hand without feeling much heat.
Thanks to the new processor, although the battery capacity is only 3000mh, it still managed to provide a much longer backup than other similar-priced phones. The 5.2 inch display screen also gives a really brilliant HD resolution display image.
MORE GOOD STUFF
The fingerprint scanner works almost flawlessly. Ninety-nine per cent of the time when I put my finger on the scanner, it immediately recognised my fingerprints and powered up the phone.
Even though there isn’t any fast charge feature, the phone still charges faster than most others in its price range, definitely a plus point for the Honor 5C.
There is a hybrid second SIM slot available, but if you are a dual SIM user you might find this a bit disappointing as you will not be able to use the SD card slot. If you are a single SIM card user, however, everything is fine and dandy.
A downside is the absence of gorilla glass protection on the Honor 5C, so users are encouraged to use a glass protector on the screen.
In view of its really affordable price tag though, I’d say it’s a pretty decent buy. The Huawei Honor 5C is available at RM799.
