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Huawei Honor 5C Handset
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Following the launch of the Huawei Honor 5X, the next product on the cab rank is the Honor 5C handset. This particular model is available in a choice of gold, silver or grey with the latter being the colour of my review sample. This handset, aimed at the young and courageous, has a price tag of £149 on a PAYG basis via sources such as Amazon, Ebuyer, Expansys and Honor’s own online store at vMail.eu.
With its diamond-polished aircraft-grade aluminium alloy body, protected by a scratch-resistant anodized coating,, and rounded corners, the Honor 5C has dimensions of 147.2 x 73.8 x 8.3mm (H x W x D) with a weight of 156g. I found it sat comfortable in the hand. Dominating the front of this handset is a 5.2-inch full HD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080p capable of displaying 167 million colours. This is a screen with 10 point multi-touch support with manual colour temperature control.
On the right side of the handset are a volume rocker and a power button. A card slot, near the top of the left side, can hold either two nano SIMS or a single one and a micro SD card to expand onboard memory up to 128GB. Located on top of the handset is a 3.5mm jack socket for attaching headphones while a micro USB port, for charging purposes, is situated on the base of the Honor 5C.
Positioned just above the screen is an 8MP camera with a BSI sensor. This front-mounted camera has an F2.0 aperture and 77 degree wide-angle lens. Selfie fans have a choice of ten different beauty modes to go with features such as automatic scene recognition and rapid capture. The Honor 5C’s main camera is a 13MP unit with flash mounted on the rear of the handset. This camera has a BSI sensor with a 78 degree wide-angle 5-element macro lens that has anti-reflective, oleophobic and infrared-absorbing coatings to reduce glare, prevent fingerprints and stop unwanted IR light from reaching the sensor. You get support for a range of creative filters and shooting modes plus HDR mode enabling a series of images with different exposures to be combined into a single photo with this camera. Both cameras produce reasonable images.
Huawei has designed the Honor 5C around a HiSilicon Kirin 650 chipset with a quad-core 2.0GHz Cortex-A53 and quad-core 1.7GHz Cortex-A53 CPU plus a Mali-T880MP2 GPU, RAM is set at 2GB with internal storage being 16GB which can be expanded with a micro SD card. Built into the Honor 5C are dual antennas with a system that automatically switches to whichever one has the best signal to reduce the problem of dropped calls. Providing the power to drive the Honor 5C is a non-removable 3000 mAh battery that, working in conjunction with the 16nm power-efficient chipset, is rated at delivering 1.34 days of heavy use.
As is Huawei’s usual practice, the Honor 5C comes with the current version of Android (Marshmallow). This operating system is overlaid by the EMUI 4.1 skin that has something of a Marmite like reputation. You either love it or hate it – I am more or less ambivalent regarding EMUI.
A three-second depress of the handset power button is required to start the Honor 5C’s boot up sequence as it carries our necessary housekeeping tasks. A further 29 seconds are taken up before you arrive at a lock screen. Following a sideways swipe you have access to various panes populated with your choice of apps. Running across the bottom of these panes are icons for Phone, Contacts, Browser and Camera.
The Honor 5C’s performance is more than adequate especially when compared against similarly priced handsets. Loading apps and scrolling through images and websites was fine although I would have preferred more of a reluctance of the screen to gather finger smears. While you do get features such as NFC and sensors such as accelerometer, compass and ambient light, I was disappointed to find that I was unable to get OTG to work with my review sample in order to play various movies and music I had stored on flash drives.
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