Late last year Huawei introduced the Honor 5X, a phone branded and sold under their Honor sub brand for their home Chinese market. A few months later, the company announced that it would be the first Honor branded smartphone to launch in the United States, and we were first given access to the phone during Honor's launch event in Las Vegas. With the Honor 5X the company is hoping to bring a great smartphone experience with capable specifications to a relatively low $199 price point, delivering a phone at the tail-end of the mid-range category that should be able to punch above its weight.

Unlike some of Honor's more expensive devices like the Honor 6, the Honor 5X doesn't come with one of HiSilicon's Kirin SoCs, and opts for a Qualcomm part instead. You can view the entire spec sheet for the Honor 5X in the table below.

Huawei Honor 5X Specifications
SoC	Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 4 x 1.5GHz Cortex A53 (Performance) 4 x 1.2GHz Cortex A53 (Efficiency) Adreno 405
RAM	2GB LPDDR3-800
NAND	16GB + microSD
Display	5.5" 1920x1080 IPS LCD
Modem	2G / 3G / 4G LTE Category 4 (Integrated Qualcomm X5 Modem)
Dimensions	151.3mm x 76.3mm x 8.15mm; 158g
Camera	Rear Facing 13MP f/2.0 28mm equivalent IMX214
	Front Facing 5MP f/2.4 22mm equivalent OV5648
Battery	3000 mAh (11.4Wh)
Launch OS	Android 5.1.1 with EmotionUI 3.1
Connectivity	802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz Only, Bluetooth 4.1 GPS/GNSS, Micro USB 2.0
Launch Price (US)	$199

At $199, the Honor 5X certainly gives you a lot for your money. It's powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 616 SoC. This is essentially a revised 615 with the Cortex-A53 performance cluster clocked at 1.5GHz and the efficiency cluster at 1.2GHz. It's worth noting that we've actually seen Snapdragon 615 designs clocked at 1.5GHz and 1.11GHz, so this is just a small frequency bump on the second cluster and it isn't something I'd expect to see significantly affect performance in the real world.

Snapdragon 616 uses Qualcomm's Adreno 405 GPU. This is something that sets the Honor 5X apart from other Snapdragon 400-series based mid-range devices like the Moto G, as we've observed Adreno 405 perform three times faster than Adreno 305 and 306 in some situations. While Adreno 405 isn't a GPU that will run the newest 3D games in 1080p, it's enough to run simpler 3D titles at a lower resolution, and it should have no problems with the majority of simple 2D smartphone games.

The Honor 5X's display is a 5.5" 1920x1080 IPS panel. I'm surprised that 1080p displays have come to the mid range market as quickly as they have, and it's looking like we won't be seeing many 720p displays outside of the sub $200 range going forward.

Huawei has chosen Sony's IMX214 for the rear-facing camera, and OmniVision's OV5648 for the front-facing camera. IMX214 has become one of the choice cameras for mid range devices, with the 2015 Moto G also using it. Since it wasn't long ago that flagship smartphones like the Nexus 6 were shipping with it one can hopefully expect good photos, although the quality of an OEM's image processing and the capabilities of the SoC's image signal processor will also have a significant impact on image quality.

The rest of the Honor 5X's specs are fairly standard for this price point. You have 2GB of LPDDR3 memory, 16GB of NAND and a MicroSD slot, and 2.4GHz 802.11n WiFi plus Bluetooth 4.1 and GPS. The Honor 5X is powered by a 3000mAh battery, which is about what you'd expect from a 5.5" device with a roughly 8mm profile.

Design

One of Huawei's big marketing points with the Honor 5X is the fact that it sports an aluminum chassis, which definitely helps to set it apart from most other mid range devices that are primarily made of plastic. While the materials used in a phone play a large role in whether it feels like a high quality device, there are many other factors that also contribute to whether it feels nice to hold in the hand.

In the case of the Honor 5X, the front of the phone actually looks a lot like the Huawei P8 and P8 Lite, although I would say it's closer to the latter of the two. Comparing it to a photo from my P8 Lite review you can see how both phones have their sensors and earpieces placed in similar positions, and unfortunately both have the relatively large black border around the display that also exists on other Huawei smartphones. I really don't understand this design choice, especially on the phones with white face plates.

The sides and back of the Honor 5X are made of aluminum. The sides have a sand blasted finish, while the back has a brushed finish. As far as $200 phones go, it's definitely one of the best that I've seen. Of course, there's still a huge difference between something like the Honor 5X and an aluminum unibody device. The low mass of the Honor 5X makes it pretty clear that the phone isn't a complete aluminum shell with a front plate put in, and that you're really dealing with a much thinner aluminum cover on the back. Even so, it's a welcomed improvement over what you'll get with most other smartphones at this price.

Although the Honor 5X is mostly made of aluminum, there are two plastic RF windows on the top and bottom. You don't ever end up feeling these, but I wish that Huawei hadn't gone and put a dimpled pattern on the inserts, because it just looks out of place and takes away from the otherwise high quality chassis.

The right side of the Honor 5X has the volume rocker and sleep/wake button, while the right side has two different removable trays. The first tray holds a Nano SIM card and a MicroSD card, while the second tray holds a Micro SIM. Dual standby support is a big feature in markets like India and China so it's not surprising to see it show up on the Honor 5X.

Overall, I think Huawei has done a good job with the design of the Honor 5X, especially when you consider its $199 price point. Often when you see something that looks like metal on a $199 phone, it ends up really being plastic designed to look like aluminum or chrome. In the case of the Honor 5X, it really is an aluminum chassis, and that's a big point of differentiation compared to something like the Moto G or the ASUS Zenfone 2.

System Performance

At this point, the performance of Snapdragon 616 is pretty much a known quantity. Nothing much has changed from Snapdragon 615. On paper, you have Snapdragon 615 with a peak clock speed of 1.7GHz on one of the Cortex A53 clusters, and a peak clock speed of 1.0GHz on the other. In practice, we've seen other implementations where one cluster goes up to 1.5GHz and the other goes to 1.11GHz. Snapdragon 616 in the Honor 5X is essentially the same as those implementations, with a small 90MHz boost on the second cluster.

Since pretty much all of Qualcomm's mid range and low end SoCs act as a quad core A53 CPU in practice, the differences in performance tend to come from the small frequency differences between them, as well as software differences from device to device. With the Honor 5X one would hope that it's able to match the Huawei P8 Lite for performance, and pull ahead of the 2015 Moto E and Moto G models by a small margin.

In our web browser benchmarks I would say that the Honor 5X performs right around where you'd expect. Scores are very close to the Moto G (2015) and the P8 Lite, which is where they should be when one considers that all the devices are basically bound by the performance of a single Cortex A53 core running at 1.4 to 1.5GHz. The gap in Octane does strike me as interesting though, as that Snapdragon 615 ran at the same 1.5GHz frequency as the Honor 5X's Snapdragon 616. Unfortunately, I no longer have the P8 Lite to take a look at this.

In pretty much all of BaseMark OS II's tests the Honor 5X is very close to the P8 Lite. The web test shows a larger gap between the two, with the Moto G actually performing closer to the P8 Lite than the Honor 5X does. Where the Honor 5X really pulls away from Snapdragon 400 series devices is the graphics performance sub test. Adreno 405 is simply much faster than Adreno 305/306 which we see in the Snapdragon 400 series SoCs, and that's just one of the benefits you get when paying the premium to move up from the $100-150 price bracket.

The Honor 5X doesn't make as strong of a showing in PCMark as it does in our web tests and BaseMark OS II. It ends up sitting behind the Moto G in all but one test, and often by a noticeable margin. Once again we see that there's a gap with web browsing performance, which in light of the similar gaps in Octane and BaseMark's web test makes me wonder if there's something on the software side reducing performance compared to Motorola's fairly "stock" firmware. One thing to note is that Huawei has addressed the problems they were having with the writing sub test, and we haven't been seeing the triple digit scores of devices like the P8 Lite for some time now.

Apart from the curious case of the Zenfone 2, Snapdragon 615/616 offers the best performance that you're going to get in a $200 smartphone. The Honor 5X does appear to have some odd reductions in web browsing performance compared to other Snapdragon 410 and 615 smartphones, including Huawei's own P8 Lite, but it's difficult to say exactly what could be causing this beyond it probably being something different in the software between all these devices.

GPU Performance

There have been significant increases in smartphone performance over the past few years, and this applies to all segments of the market. While it's not entirely clear what will come after Cortex A53 in the low end and mid range segments - Snapdragon 650 currently skews towards the higher-end of the market - it's a safe bet that CPU performance will continue to improve. GPU performance has also seen improvement, but perhaps not to the same degree as CPU performance. The GPU performance of low end devices isn't quite where I'd like it to be, although hopefully this will change with Snapdragon 415's entry into the market. For the time being, GPU performance is something that separates mid range devices like the Honor 5X with its Adreno 405 GPU from lower end devices like the Moto E and even the Moto G which use Adreno 306.

Since Adreno 405 is very well known by this point, and there are fewer software related factors to influence GPU performance than CPU performance, I'm really not expecting any significant deviation from the performance of other phones with the same GPU. However, with the Honor 5X pushing a 1080p display it is interesting to see how the performance when running at native resolution is impacted when moving from a 720p to 1080p display.

As expected, the Honor 5X tracks extremely closely with the P8 Lite in BaseMark X's off screen tests. Compared to the Moto G which uses Adreno 306 we see that the Honor 5X is roughly 2.7x faster on average, which is a very significant performance improvement.

Like the results from BaseMark X, Adreno 405 performs anywhere from 2-3x better than Adreno 305/306 in GFXBench 3.0. On screen results are lower than the P8 Lite due to the Honor 5X's higher resolution display, but off screen results are essentially identical. It's worth noting that T-Rex HD is a pretty old test by now, and these mid range and low end smartphones aren't able to get anywhere close to playable frame rates at their native resolutions. Displays have definitely outpaced GPU improvements in this segment of the market, and it'll take quite a while for the GPUs to catch up.

It's interesting to note that the anomalous ASUS Zenfone 2 is still way more powerful than anything else at $200, including the Honor 5X. However, ASUS's relationship with Intel puts them in a special position, and relative to the average $200 smartphone I think the Honor 5X is about as good as it gets for GPU performance.

NAND Performance

Considering that many high end smartphones haven't moved to UFS or other high performance storage solutions, it's a safe bet that eMMC is going to stick around in mid range and low end smartphones for the foreseeable future. We've already seen how devices shipping with slower storage controllers can be bottlenecked by slow storage performance, and this is an even larger problem among less expensive smartphones where it's just not feasible to include the best NAND solution on the market. Huawei themselves has had issues with NAND performance in the past, and they've improved significantly with recent smartphones, so one would hope that this holds true for the Honor 5X as well.

The Honor 5X's NAND performance is in line with what you get from other low end and mid range smartphones. You can't really expect mind blowing NAND performance from these devices, but one can hope that we're at the point where the NAND is fast enough to not be the bottleneck in the system. There's significant improvements across the board compared to the P8 Lite, which is good to see as the P8 Lite performed extremely poorly for a $250 device. I think many of these mid range devices could stand to improve on random write speeds, but that's a more general discussion for another time.

Display Analysis

With each year we've seen the displays on smartphones get better and better. It really wasn't that long ago that we saw the first 720p panels on flagship smartphones, and now we're at the point where a $200 mid range phone can ship with a 1080p IPS display. In the case of the Honor 5X it's a 5.5" 1920x1080 IPS LCD panel. Like most phones, the LCD is optically bonded to the cover glass.

Something I'm definitely going to have to keep an eye on going forward is whether or not these mid range phones with IPS displays actually have a native 8-bit per channel color depth. Because of modern Android's relative lack of gradients I haven't bothered doing so, as you don't really see any issues cropping up. However, the Honor 5X has many gradients, especially in the areas where translucency is used in the UI, and it's fairly obvious that there's color banding occurring.

It's difficult to capture this in a photo, but I think the above photo is able to demonstrate the effect fairly well. I suspect that many of these mid range phones are using IPS displays with 6-bit color and frame rate control to simulate a greater color depth, and there simply aren't enough discrete color levels to properly render the gradients. It's not a deal breaker or anything, but it definitely takes away from the aesthetic quality of translucency, and it's something I'll be looking for more closely going forward.

A display can be measured in several ways beyond simply comparing resolution and pixel density, and to examine the Honor 5X's display in a comprehensive manner I've sent it through our standard smartphone display workflow. As always, measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. All data is collected and managed using SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.

I was honestly quite surprised by the Honor 5X's high peak brightness. 556 nits places it among the best flagship phones, and the black level at max brightness leads to a static contrast ratio of 1207:1, which I've confirmed is not the result of any backlight trickery. Low contrast has definitely been an issue with other mid range and low end smartphones, and I'm happy to say that the Honor 5X doesn't disappoint. The only caveat is that Huawei is still employing their brightness reduction when you use Google Chrome, and the drop is pretty massive as well. It's not even done in a subtle manner either, as the brightness just plummets when you open the browser. I think users should have the option to make the brightness vs. battery life tradeoff, even if that means sacrificing quite a bit of the latter for a brighter screen, and I hope this auto reduction eventually disappears from Huawei's phones.

Greyscale accuracy on the Honor 5X isn't horrible by any means, but it's not very accurate either. The DeltaE value is in the same range as other mid range smartphones like the Moto E, Moto G, and Zenfone 2. Calibration hasn't really trickled down from high end smartphones yet, except in the strange case of some Microsoft Lumia smartphones. In this case, the display exhibits a noticeable blue shift which reduces accuracy.

Saturation accuracy is similar to greyscale accuracy on the Honor 5X, and for the same reason too. As you can see, all colors are pulled toward blue to some degree which causes them to render differently than they should. Again, this error is in line with other mid range phones, so it's not like Huawei is behind the competition here, but they're not exactly raising the bar either.

Accuracy in the Gretag-MacBeth ColorChecker is also similar to saturation and greyscale accuracy, which isn't surprising when one considers how the test actually includes greyscale values and the fact that color mixtures require both greyscale shades and saturations to be accurate in order to render correctly.

In the end, the Honor 5X's display is above average relative to its price. It's a 1080p panel with a very high brightness and good black levels as well. Color accuracy isn't any better than the competition, but the competition is also mostly made up of 1280x720 panels that are 100 nits dimmer at full brightness, so it's fair to say that Huawei has done a good job with the Honor 5X's display given their constraints. I think the sort of user who buys the Honor 5X probably won't be bothered by the color inaccuracy anyway, although I do still hope to see higher accuracy trickle down from the flagships to the mid range market within the next year as it becomes more difficult to differentiate on hardware and price.

Battery Life

There was a time where mid range smartphones ended up sacrificing battery life due to various factors, including less efficient display panels, SoCs made on older manufacturing nodes, and batteries that weren't able to keep up with the amount of power being used. Things have improved somewhat, although there are still circumstances where a mid range phone to aim a bit too high with its specs and compromise battery life as a result, such as what happened with the ASUS Zenfone 2. The Honor 5X doesn't pack the most powerful SoC available, but it is shipping with a relatively large, bright, and high resolution LCD display. To evaluate the Honor 5X's battery life in various scenarios I've run it through our suite of battery benchmarks, which includes our own WiFi web browsing test, along with the battery benchmarks included with BaseMark OS II, GFXBench 3.0, and PCMark.

The Honor 5X does fairly well in our WiFi web browsing benchmark. It comes in at just under ten hours, which puts it well above the Huawei P8 Lite and the Zenfone 2. It doesn't last as long as Motorola's smartphones though, which is mostly a function of the 5X's larger and higher resolution display.

The Honor 5X lasts quite a long time in BaseMark OS II's battery test. Of course, things have to put in context with this test, as it's a variable workload test. It's arguable that a device like the iPhone 6s which maintains a much higher level of performance during the duration of the test will obviously last a shorter time, and that it's better to perform well for a shorter time than to perform just decently for a longer time. That being said, when you look at the Honor 5X and compare it to similar devices like the Moto G and Huawei's own P8 Lite, it's clear that it provides better longevity in a CPU heavy workload. The comparison between it and the Snapdragon 615 based P8 Lite is actually quite interesting, as the Honor 5X only has a 36% larger battery but lasts 75% longer.

The Honor 5X is right in the middle of the chart for PCMark's work battery life test, which is a good indicator of battery life during mixed usage. It's again worth noting that a device like the Moto G lasts much longer due to its very large battery relative to the power usage of its components, but compared to your average smartphone the Honor 5X does just fine here.

In GFXBench's T-Rex HD unlimited battery test the Honor 5X lasts for 4.23 hours, which is the best result I've seen for a Snapdragon 600 series device. The Moto E and Moto G both last much longer, but they also perform significantly worse during the duration of the test, so again we're getting into the discussion of how it's better to actually run a game properly for a shorter time than to produce an unplayable frame rate for a long time. In this case, the Honor 5X actually can't run the T-Rex HD test at a constant 30fps either, mainly due to its native 1080p resolution. However, it should be significantly more capable of playing more basic 3D games that may render at a lower resolution than devices with Adreno 305 and 306. At 1080p it maintains a frame rate of slightly under 15fps for basically the entire duration, with power related throttling impacting performance right near the very end.

Overall I think that the Honor 5X provides a sufficient battery lifetime to get you through each day before having to recharge. Since the CPU and GPU aren't that fast you don't really have to worry about apps that strain those parts of the system draining your battery quickly, although the trade-off is that some of those apps just won't be usable in general. PCMark's battery test is a good indicator of battery life with a real life mixed use workload, and in that test the Honor 5X sits right in the middle, which is where you'd expect a mid range phone to be.

Charge Time

Since the Honor 5X provides relative good battery life there's not a pressing need to provide super fast charging, as charging will typically be done overnight over a period of 8-10 hours. Interestingly enough, Huawei does market the Honor 5X as supporting 2A fast chargers, but it ships with a standard 5W charging block. Given that buyers of a $199 phone are probably not going to spend $20-40 buying an additional quick charging block, the charge time that most users experience will be the one provided by the charger included in the box.

With its 5W charger the Huawei Honor 5X takes about 4.62 hours to charge from 0 to 100%. For whatever reason I was getting some erroneous data from the Honor 5X when polling data to graph the input power and charge over time, and so I've omitted that graph to avoid inaccurately characterizing it. 4.62 hours is quite a long time, but when you pair a 3000mAh (11.4Whr) battery with a 5W charger it's not surprising that a phone takes a long time to charge. Considering the $200 price tag it's not really a deal breaker, but having a 10W charger included would be nicer.

Camera Architecture

In the past it was the case that non flagship smartphones had to compromise the camera experience pretty severely. The SoCs didn't have image signal processors that could compete with flagship devices, and the sensors were generally pretty poor, with some not even supporting autofocus. Nowadays we see the camera sensors from the flagship phones of one or two years prior making their way into mid range devices, which has improved image quality dramatically. Even at $199, the Honor 5X ships with a very capable camera setup, and you can view the specifics of both the front and rear-facing sensors below.

	Huawei Honor 5X
Front Camera Resolution	5MP
Front Camera Sensor	Omnivision OV5648 (1/4", 1.4µm)
Front Camera Focal Length	22mm equivalent
Front Camera Aperture	f/2.0
Rear Camera Resolution	13MP
Rear Camera Sensor	Sony IMX214 (1/3.06", 1.12µm)
Rear Camera Focal Length	28mm equivalent
Rear Camera Aperture	f/2.0

Something interesting is the fact that the Honor 5X uses the same camera sensor arrangement as the OnePlus One. The front camera is Omnivision's OV5648 while the rear is Sony's IMX214 which we've also seen on the Moto G (2015) and the Nexus 6. As I said before, these mid range devices are shipping with very capable sensors. Unfortunately, image processing is often still an issue, which isn't helped by the fact that the ISPs in these mid range SoCs still lag behind those in flagships. Offering sufficiently high quality image processing would definitely put the Honor 5X ahead of the competition.

Still Image Testing

With the weather in the Canadian tundra having settled down a bit I've been able to return to my typical photo scenes rather than utilizing photos taken by Josh. With the Honor 5X using the same rear-facing camera as the Moto G and Nexus 6 those will be the most obvious points of comparison, although equivalently priced devices like the Zenfone 2 are included as well, as well as the iPhone 6s and Galaxy S6 Edge for flagship reference points. As always, the first test is taken with enough sunlight that all devices should be shooting at base ISO with a very quick shutter speed.

Daytime Photography

Huawei Honor 5XMoto G (2015)Google Nexus 6ASUS Zenfone 2Moto E (2015)Apple iPhone 6sSamsung Galaxy S6 EdgeGoogle Nexus 5XGoogle Nexus 5X HDR+

When I compare the Honor 5X's daylight image to other phones, as well as to how the scene looked to my eyes, there are two things that are immediately apparent. The first is the fact that Huawei's photo simply isn't as sharp as the one taken by the Moto G or the Nexus 6. The thin branches of the foliage are much blurrier, and this is most obvious with the tree on the right side of the frame which is very hazy and blurry on the Honor 5X, but fairly sharp on the other IMX214 devices. The second obvious observation is that the Honor 5X's white balance is skewed too far toward blue, with the entire photo having a colder appearance than it should. The Honor 5X's white balance actually makes the scene look more like what you'd see on a cloudy day, despite the fact that the sky is clear. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as far as photo quality goes, but it's definitely not true to how the scene originally looked.

One other issue with the Honor 5X's image is the heavy noise in the sky. The Zenfone 2 suffers from this as well, but the rest of the smartphones don't really have an issue with this.

When taking photos during the day the Honor 5X does alright, but it doesn't do as well as the Moto G which uses the same sensor. Huawei could definitely improve their camera processing to improve image quality when shooting during the day, and it's something they should be thinking about as they issue software updates to the Honor 5X.

Night Photography

Huawei Honor 5XMoto G (2015)Google Nexus 6ASUS Zenfone 2Moto E (2015)Apple iPhone 6sSamsung Galaxy S6 EdgeGoogle Nexus 5XGoogle Nexus 5X HDR+

In night time photography the Honor 5X struggles, which isn't uncommon for these mid range devices. Comparing to the Nexus 6 and Moto G reveals some interesting differences. The Nexus 6 definitely wins, although it's really showing its age by this point. The Honor 5X and Moto G handle their processing in two different ways. The Moto G has significant chroma noise which is very distracting, while the Honor 5X doesn't. However, the Moto G's image also retains more detail, while the Honor 5X's image looks blurrier and less detailed. This is due to Huawei's heavier noise reduction, which is removing the noise but removing details along with it. Ultimately, this is a trade off where no method is clearly better than the other, and in this case I would probably say that the Honor 5X is better due to how distracting chroma noise is, but other people may feel that the Honor 5X's less detailed image is the worse of the two.

Video Recording

The Honor 5X can record 1080p video at 30fps. This is pretty much par for the course with mid range Android phones, but this is a situation where differences in processing quality can result in enormous differences between devices that you would expect to perform similarly.

The 1080p30 video from the Honor 5X is encoded at 20Mbps using the H.264 Baseline profile. Huawei has something on their website talking about H.265 compression and it seems to be implying that the phone uses it for video, but there's absolutely no way to do so and the phone isn't capable of H.265 encoding in hardware anyway. It is capable of decoding HEVC streams, which is a feature shared among all Snapdragon 615 and 616 devices.

The quality of the Honor 5X's 1080p video is unfortunately not very good. It's just really blurry across the entire frame, and pretty shaky. One redeeming attribute is that the frame rate seems to be fairly stable, which can sometimes be a problem on low end and mid range smartphones when the exposure changes or you move quickly during a video.

One other feature Huawei advertises is the ability to do slow-mo video recording. I didn't even bother putting a video sample for this because the feature just isn't worth using. The videos are recorded at 640x480 at 120fps, but I'm fairly sure that it's really a video shot at a lower frame rate that is being interpolated to 120fps. When played back at normal speed it doesn't look as fluid as 120fps video, and when you slow it down the gaps between frames are really large and the video becomes quite stuttery. This is on top of the low resolution and bitrate, and while I applaud Huawei for trying to bring this feature to mid range phones, the ISP is just not up to the task.

Software

In my review of the Huawei P8 Lite I opted to not spend too much time talking about EmotionUI as Andrei had already done a very thorough job in his reviews of other Huawei devices. The same is true for the Honor 5X to a degree, as Andrei has covered EmotionUI 3.1 fairly extensively already. That being said, I do have a few remarks to make about how it looks and performs on the Honor 5X.

The first thing I noticed that contrasts with EmotionUI 3.1 on the Huawei P8 is the fact that the Honor 5X goes for a much more colorful look. Everything from the icons to the wallpaper is brighter and uses a greater range of bright colors than on the P8. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with Huawei's target audience is for the Honor family (e.g. Millennials), but it's a significant deviation from the default UI on the Huawei Mate and Ascend smartphones.

What interests me about EmotionUI is how quickly some people are to dismiss it as a wholesale copy of iOS. There are certainly elements inspired by iOS, just as much as iOS has elements inspired by Android devices. However, there are only a few things that really remind me of iOS devices, with most applications being as unique as they can be considering the fact that they still need to be accessible and usable by a wide range of users who will have preconceptions about how a calendar app or a calculator app is supposed to work. The only things that do make me raise an eyebrow are the liberal use of translucency, the Clock app, swiping down on the home screen to bring up a search bar, and the little settings drawer that you can bring up by swiping up from the bottom of the screen on the lock screen. To be honest, I never found that feature to be very useful either, as most of the functions are things that I also want access to within other applications instead of only when my phone is locked.

Android purists will definitely hate the fact that Huawei's launcher does away with the application drawer and integrates apps and widgets on the same pages. For me this wasn't a big problem, because I rarely find any use for Android's widgets. Ironically, the Honor 5X has a clock and weather widget that I actually did like and end up keeping, and yet I still didn't take issue with Huawei's decision. If you aren't a fan, you can always install one of the many launchers from Google Play and return to the norm, but it's definitely worth noting that EmotionUI is far from what you get on a Nexus phone out of the box.

Something that definitely differentiates the Honor 5X from other smartphones in this price range is its fingerprint scanner. Fingerprint scanners have gotten a lot better on Android than what we saw on the Galaxy S5, or going back even farther, the Motorola Atrix. Like Google's Nexus smartphones, the Honor 5X uses a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. It doesn't protrude like Nexus Imprint does, so it's actually more like the fingerprint scanner on the HTC One Max than the Nexus phones, but the idea is basically the same across all of the devices.

Training your fingerprint is fairly easy. You just press it against the scanner five times, and if it thinks it didn't scan a certain area thoroughly it'll prompt you to press a certain area against it one more time. Interestingly enough, it blocked me from registering one finger a second time, and it only took a single press for it to recognize and block it from being scanned. Thankfully, there's no need to scan a finger multiple times, because the scanner is fairly accurate and I haven't had too many problems with it not scanning on the first try.

Huawei also includes some features like the ability to quick launch apps when you scan a certain finger, but I think this is completely overcomplicating the entire interaction. On top of that, the scanner is quite small and the position of it makes it difficult to use with any finger other than your index finger, so I don't see that feature as being very useful.

UI Performance

Something that I haven't always been impressed with is the UI performance on the Honor 5X. To be honest, it can feel quite sluggish at times, with noticeable jank and dropped frames. These issues often crop up when you're in a part of the UI that uses translucency heavily, and that's just the price you pay for running computationally complex effects on a GPU that really can't manage them properly at this resolution. For example, the notification drawer often can't manage 30fps animations, let alone 60fps. Pulling down on a home screen to bring up a search bar and a keyboard is always janky too.

I don't think it makes sense to have a unified UI if the effects don't run well on your devices, and I would trade the blur for higher framerates in a heartbeat. It looks pretty, but the hardware on the 5X just can't pull it off. On top of that, the display's posterization is most apparent when there's blurring occurring because there's simply not enough precision to render the gradients correctly. Translucency can be a nice effect, but color banding really kills it.

Unfortunately, the big issue with the idea of removing translucency is the fact that the UI depends fairly heavily on it. Applications like the Clock app, and UI elements like the notification drawer adapt to the color scheme given by your wallpaper, and that's a way to personalize your device beyond simple changes like icons or the wallpaper when you're in the launcher. I suppose there's always going to be a tradeoff, and I think I would still opt to get rid of it if it meant areas like the notification drawer would perform better, but I understand the reasoning behind keeping it around even on the less powerful devices.

In the end I'm actually pretty happy with EmotionUI. There are often times where you'll use a device and there's just something about the manufacturer's interface that really feels like a regression from Google's own UI or the UI from another vendor. I never really got that feeling when using the Honor 5X. The only problem for me is the fact that the blur is definitely causing performance problems, and even though it looks really nice I would rather have the performance than the visuals. On top of that, the color banding really lets it down, and in general I think on their mid range devices Huawei should probably in a different direction in order to maintain performance. From what I've been told, the Honor 5X is slated to move to EmotionUI 4.0 around the time it gets the Android Marshmallow update, and it'll be interesting to see what happens to the UI and performance when that transition occurs.

Final Words

When you look at the Honor 5X on paper it's impossible to deny that it offers some pretty great specs for its $199 price tag. Of course, specs alone don't make the phone, as they don't always translate into a good real world experience. In the case of the Honor 5X, however, I actually believe that they do. But before making any conclusions it's important to take a look at everything as a whole to see where it excels and where it needs some work.

Design wise, I think the Honor 5X is a solid $199 phone. The best I've seen here previously is plastic done well, and never a metal chassis. That being said, you obviously don't get the same fit, finish, and feel as an aluminum unibody device like the HTC One A9 or the iPhone. At $199 it would be unreasonable to expect that, and what the Honor 5X does provide is more than I would expect from a $199 phone. The metal chassis feels good in the hand, with an interesting mix of a brushed finish on the back and a sandblasted finish on the sides. I'm really not a big fan of the dot pattern on the RF inserts, and they don't align as well as I would like with the rest of the back, but these are fairly minor aesthetic complaints and they don't take away from how the phone feels when you use it.

The Honor 5X performs well for a $200 phone, and at this point there aren't really any big surprises that come with Snapdragon 616. CPU performance honestly isn't any better than the Snapdragon 410 or 615 devices, but the GPU performance is certainly much faster than 410. This is definitely an advantage over devices like the Moto G, which sell for similar prices. The 2GB of RAM also helps to ensure that apps can remain in memory and you don't run into problems like the launcher reloading or apps frequently crashing.

The 1920x1080 IPS display on the Honor 5X is quite good for a $200 device. Something worth mentioning is that it comes with a plastic screen protector pre-applied, which I promptly removed as I'm generally not a fan of any screen protectors. The quality of the LCD is better than I expected, with a much higher brightness than I've seen on any other mid range device, and the sharpness that you'd expect from a 401ppi panel. My only two issues are the fact that it's not calibrated, and the issues with color banding that are made more obvious by EmotionUI's translucency. Going forward, I'm definitely going to need to keep a closer eye on which devices utilize panels with native 8-bit per channel color depth, especially once HDR displays get thrown into the mix. Neither of these are deal breakers, but they're just something to make note of.

The Honor 5X did well in our battery life tests. Roughly ten hours in our web browsing test and over seven hours in PCMark are not scores to scoff at. It also lasts fairly long in BaseMark OS II and GFXBench 3.0, but it also doesn't perform near as well as other devices and I don't think there's much point in running a game at 15fps for four hours.

The camera is not exactly a weak point on the Honor 5X, but one could say that it's a weaker offering than what one would expect from a device with Sony's IMX214 sensor. In my daylight photo scene it's clear that the Honor 5X doesn't produce an output with the same level of sharpness as the Nexus 6 and Moto G. The color balance also seems a bit off, with the scene being shifted further toward blue than it should be. In addition, Huawei has similar problems to ASUS with heavy noise appearing in areas where it really shouldn't be, such as the sky of a photo taken during broad daylight. Since the Honor 5X has a better ISP than the Moto G this really comes down to Huawei's image processing, and it's something they can look to improve with future updates and devices. As for night time photography, it's really a toss up between the Honor 5X and Moto G. The 5X doesn't have the Moto G's chroma noise, but it's also has visibly less detail due to the heavy noise reduction smearing it away.

Finally, there's the Honor 5X's software. From a functional and visual perspective I actually don't mind this version of EmotionUI at all. If you're more of a purist you can always do away with Huawei's launcher, although you are still stuck with their applications and system wide elements like the notification shade. From a performance perspective I think Huawei needs to do a bit more work here. There are areas where the UI becomes really janky, and it's often when there's heavy translucency being used. There's really no point in using a UI that can't run properly with your CPU and GPU, and given the choice, I would take a smoother simpler UI over a complicated sluggish one every time.

While the Honor 5X certainly isn't sluggish in general, the few areas where it is are ones that you end up visiting a bit too often to simply ignore the issues, and I hope Huawei can take a look at the places where performance isn't where it should be and work on optimizing code and altering visuals to bring up the frame rate. I'm told that both EmotionUI 4.0 and Android Marshmallow are expected to show up for the Honor 5X within the next couple months, and those represent good opportunities to improve performance.

In the end the Honor 5X offers you a lot for your money, and so it fulfills its expected role quite well. You get a nice display, good internal hardware relative to the price, a metal chassis, a good fingerprint scanner, and a good camera. For $199 it would be difficult to find a better phone that you can buy as easily and widely as the Honor 5X, with the exception of users who value performance above everything else and would opt for the Zenfone 2. For everyone else looking for a mid-range smartphone, the Honor 5X should be high up on your list.