Review: Honor 5C

Introduction, key features and design

The Honor 5C is a phone that's cheap enough to buy contract-free, without feeling like you've just made an investment big enough to make partners consider leaving you, and parents worry for your sanity.

It costs £149.99 in the UK, which means it's cheaper than both its bigger brother, the Honor 5X, and the Motorola Moto G4.

With a strong spec list for the price, the Honor 5C looks to be off to a good start and it's in the budget end of the market where the fledgling brand can really get a foothold.

Gunning for the G4

As a brand that's still struggling for recognition outside the realms of tech fans and bargain hunters, it seems sensible for Honor to aim squarely at the mainstream with the Honor 5C. It arrives at just the right time too.

The Motorola Moto G4 rules the budget phone roost, but the latest version will be too big for many users – Moto Gs now have 5.5-inch screens. The Honor 5C has a more palm-friendly 5.2-inch display.

A phone of real aggression, it also has an octa-core CPU, 16GB of storage, a 13MP camera and 1080p screen resolution. In every key respect it matches the Moto G, but it costs £20 less. You may not love every part of the Honor 5C, but it's clearly a pretty good deal.

Design and display

The first area in which Honor tries to get an edge over the Motorola Moto G is with the 5C's design. Rather than using an all-plastic shell, like a lot of cheaper phones, the Honor 5C's backplate is brushed aluminum.

Its sides are plastic, and the border between the metal and plastic parts very clear, but when it catches the light you can tell in an instant its back is the real deal. While the phone isn't all that pretty as a whole, at this price a hint of metallic glamour is a nice win.

What it doesn't get you is the feel of a mostly-metal phone. A rigid, hard back is a bonus, but companies like Samsung use metal on the sides of their phones, rather than on the back, for good reason. It's where the most sensitive parts of your hands land: your fingertips.

Those are the parts the Honor 5C needs to convince with. And when you're likely to have perhaps one fingertip on the actual metal bits, it doesn't do a perfect job. Don't expect the Honor 5C to feel as expensive as an iPhone.

However, it's pleasant to handle and use. It's just 8.3mm thick, has smoothly curved sides and is very pocketable.

After using the Honor 5C for a couple of weeks, we did find that the metal back is very easy to scratch – bear that in mind if you're a serial phone abuser.

There's also no fingerprint scanner – the Chinese version of this phone has one, but the western version doesn't. You'll have to either use a touchscreen PIN/password, or go without home screen security.

With the Moto G4 Plus's fingerprint scanner having shown up those on more expensive phones, though, never mind budget ones, we'd rather Honor leave the feature out than pack in a dodgy one.

The Honor 5C's design is not a Harry Potter-grade work of magic, just a neat and practical design for a phone of this price. What we're more impressed with is the screen.

Until fairly recently, a 5-inch phone under £200 would almost certainly have a 720p screen. The 1080p OnePlus X and the latest Moto G have raised the stakes, and Honor has responded.

The Honor 5C has a 5.2-inch 1080p IPS LCD that, at the time of our review, is among the best screens available for the price. It's sharp, and the colors are vivid, with only small sacrifices in terms of accuracy. Some reds appear a bit less relaxed than they should, but when saturated screens are en vogue, you'll see similar effects in phones three times the price.

What has impressed us more, though, is how well the display performs in other areas. Viewing angles are excellent for a phone this cheap, and outdoors visibility is remarkably good. It's a bold, sharp and bright screen that wouldn't have looked out of place in a device more than twice the price a year or so ago.

We've been looking for problems with the Honor 5C, sure that there must be some notable flaws to find in a phone of the price. But there certainly aren't any when it comes to the screen – even the Auto brightness setting, a feature that's often spotty in lower-cost mobiles, is fairly reliable.

There is one hardware element that Honor has cheaped-out on though: the Honor 5C doesn't have a Gorilla Glass protective layer, instead using an unspecified brand of tempered glass.

However, after fairly carefree use, including keeping the phone in a pocket with keys and loose change on occasion, it remains scratch-free, unlike the aluminium back. The Honor 5C may be wearing supermarket-brand trainers, but they do the job.

What's it like to use?

Interface and reliability

Many people turn their noses up at the software Honor puts on its phones; like parent company Huawei's phones and tablets, they use the Emotion UI interface. To be specific, the Honor 5C uses Emotion UI 4.1 on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

We'll look at why EMUI really isn't all that bad shortly, but let's deal with the bad stuff first. EMUI alters the structure of Android, by getting rid of the apps menu.

In a stock Android phone, there's a plain white-background apps menu, which acts as a toy box for all your apps. Home screens are then left for you to fill with apps you use all the time, or to keep blank, whatever you like.


As the Honor 5C only has home screens it operates more like an iPhone. Every app goes on these pages, and this can be a bit of a culture shock, particularly when the apps are plonked onto screens in the order in which they're installed. You either have to develop a superhuman long-term memory to recall where your favourite apps sit, or get organised with app folders.

In one respect EMUI is flattened, simplified. However, if you're a real app fan it may not be simpler to actually use day-to-day.

At this point in Emotion UI's development, though, that's the only real problem. Previous versions have been packed full of idiosyncrasies that seem a bit odd to your average US or UK user, like pictures of babies popping up on your lock screen, but much of this has now gone.

Emotion UI in 2016 may be a little high-maintenance, but it's also very clean. There are some preinstalled apps, and some of them are distinctly bloaty, but all contentious ones can easily be deleted. For example, a few free-to-play Gameloft games are pre-loaded, but even these sit in a folder out of the way.

Customisation is another strong suit. We've been happy with the plain standard theme, but a Themes app lets you download reams more for free. Most are rubbish, but the same is true of the theme libraries you'll find on other phones.

The tweaking goes deeper too. You can change how many rows of apps appear on your Honor 5C home screens, and the animation used for page turns. We recommend not touching the latter, as it has the potential to beam your phone's style right back to 2010. But, as the hordes of awful themes show, tastes vary.

There will be plenty of people who won't like the Honor 5C's software, and it's not simply a case of 'haters gotta hate' – but we've enjoyed using the relatively plain version of the UI found here.

One crucial thing to mention: the Honor 5C does not feel slow. We'll look into performance properly later, but lots of older phones running Emotion UI feel slowed down by it – not here.

Movies, music and gaming

The Honor 5C also takes a much more old-school approach to media than some phones. Rather than just leaving you with Google's video and music apps, there are custom Huawei media apps.

There's value to this. Over the years Google's media apps have become less about playing the music and videos you own, and more about promoting the Google Play store's wares. They've become heavy, a bit pushy.

Huawei's apps are all about playing what's on your phone, not trying to get you to sign up to any subscription services or buy the new Coldplay album. These music apps are refreshing, even if you may find something you like more from a quick Google Play search.

The high-quality screen makes the Honor 5C a good fit for watching a bit of Netflix or the odd YouTube video. If that's going to be one of your phone's main duties, though, consider the larger 5.5-inch Moto G – it's just better for the purpose, because of the extra 0.3 inches of display space.

The Honor 5C's internal speaker is only fair, rather than great, too. It fires out of the bottom of the phone and, contrary to appearances, uses a mono driver. There may be two grilles, but there's only a speaker behind one of them – the other one is just there for visual symmetry.

The maximum volume of the speaker is reasonable, but the mids are a little hard when volume is maxed-out, and the sound in general is thinner than the best around; the Moto G has the advantage here too.

Specs and benchmark performance

The Honor 5C has an 'in-house' processor. It's a HiSilicon Kirin 650, and HiSilicon is a subsidiary of Huawei, just like Honor. This is paired with 2GB RAM, which is the minimum you'd want to see in a mid-range phone running Android 6.0.

While the Kirin 650 is an octa-core processor, it's actually the least we'd expect for a 1080p phone. It's roughly the equivalent of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617/615, using eight Cortex-A53 cores of which four are clocked at 2GHz, and four at 1.7GHz.

These are the kind of processor cores a high-end phone of last year might use as its 'everyday' non-performance cores. It's a bit like a car using a bunch of 1-liter engines rather than a snarling 4-liter V8 beast.

In practice it works well though, earning the Honor 5C 3890 points in Geekbench 3, or around 900 per core. That's significantly more than the Moto G achieves, because this phone's cores run at a much higher clock speed – each core is 500MHz faster.

We'd advise not reading too much into this, though. HiSilicon may have used the higher speed because the Kirin 650 is less effective at translating its power into real-world performance, or just because it wanted to beat the rival Snapdragon at benchmarks. Kirin processors have suffered from rather inconsistent real-world performance over the years, so HiSilicon has something to prove.

Leave aside the bravado, though, and the Honor 5C comes off perfectly well. App load speeds could be a mite faster on occasion, but the phone runs Android well, and can play high-end games without them turning into a painful slideshow.

That last point is particularly important. Recently we reviewed the Kirin-powered Huawei MediaPad M3, and despite it having a higher-end Kirin CPU it struggles with a lot of games; the Honor 5X also feels a bit slow all-round.

Everything we've tried on the Honor 5C runs well, though, with only minor frame rate hitches. This includes Asphalt 8, Munch's Oddysee, Minecraft and Dead Trigger 2. Minecraft was the only game that would start to chug, when the draw distance is maxed out. That's not the standard setting.

This isn't a phone with masses of power to spare that'll see it sail through 2018's Android games, able to play them with visuals maxed-out, but given the price that's not a big issue.

Battery life and camera

Battery

Like previous Honor phones such as the Honor 6 Plus, the 5C's battery life strategy is to use a big, high-mAh count unit. It's rated at 3000mAh, which is large for a phone with a 5.2-inch screen.

In general use we found the Honor 5C lasted through a solid day of fairly intensive use. It's long-lasting enough not to be annoying or unreliable, but perhaps not quite as stellar as the milliampere count may suggest. It lands on the 'good' side of normal.

Its performance in our usual 720p video test, which involves playing a 90-minute film at maximum brightness with Wi-Fi running in the background, is nothing special, though. The Honor 5C lost 23% of its charge, which is significantly more than the 17% shed by the Moto G4. This may be because of the screen's high power consumption at max brightness.

The one thing we miss on the Honor 5C in daily use is fast charging. Fast-charging phones can often go from empty to 80% in under 30 minutes, but this handset takes a good two-plus hours to charge up.

Fast charging is increasingly being introduced on cheaper phones, so the Honor 5C's successor may well offer it.

Camera

The Honor 5C's camera can take some really striking images for a budget phone. It's all down to the series of really quite good 13-megapixel sensors that started being used in cheap phones a couple of years ago.

This phone has a 13-megapixel f/2 rear camera, with most likely either a Sony or Samsung sensor. Much like the screen, it offers the sort of experience you would have had to pay top dollar for a couple of years ago.

In daylight, colors are vivid and largely natural-looking, the level of detail is excellent, and a mix of good dynamic range and sensible metering deliver shots that generally look good, and at times look quite terrific. There's a little bit of shutter lag, but in real-world use this is offset by a screen that lets you see what's going on comfortably, even on a sunny day.

While strong cameras in cheaper phones have been around for a while now, we're still very satisfied with what the Honor 5C offers. It's particularly good for taking dramatic-looking close-ups, with the combo of pronounced background blur and the ability to focus quite close up proving powerful.

That's not to say it's without flaws, though – there are several. First, low-light image quality is poor. It's very easy to take blurry low-light shots, and the fizzy-looking night processing makes images look quite ugly.

Focusing isn't too hot either – and this is the biggie. Looking back over the few hundred images we shot with the Honor 5C, swathes of them were out of focus because the AF system simply hadn't clicked in. You need to be sure the phone has focused properly before shooting to avoid missed moments, because it's quite poor at focusing without a finger prompt.

As such the Moto G4 is perhaps a bit stronger in the camera department, but the Honor 5C still does well.

Its selfie camera is good too. Honor is actually keener to boast about this front camera, an 8MP Sony/Hynix sensor. It too has an f/2 lens, can capture quite a lot of detail, and renders colors naturally.

That an affordable handset like the Honor 5C can fit in not one but two respectable camera setups shows you how little you have to pay to get decent daylight smartphone snaps these days – what you have to pay extra for is good low-light shots.

The Honor 5C can only really take fair low-light shots if you're able to keep the phone ultra-still. There's a full-on Manual camera mode that enables you to slow the shutter speed right down, but without optical image stabilisation it's not all that much use handheld; you'll either need to rest the phone on a surface, or be the oddball carrying around a phone tripod.

Another feature you miss out on here is 4K video; you can only capture at 1080p, and the video mode doesn't use software stabilisation either.

Camera samples

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Verdict and competition

The Honor 5C is a very solid phone selling at an attractive price. It's spot on for those who want a phone without a contract.

The little hints of higher-end phone characteristics, like a good Full HD screen and strong selfie camera, have real appeal. The Emotion UI software is much less abrasive than some older versions, and there are no major performance issues.

The main issue here is that there's a lot of competition in the cheap phone arena. The Moto G, for example, has a slightly better rear camera with more reliable focusing, and you may prefer its vanilla Android software.

Who's this for?

The Honor 5C is a very solid phone for those who want a cheap deal but don't want to put up with too many painful compromises in performance or camera quality. While it's not better than the Motorola Moto G4, it is smaller and slightly cheaper.

Should you buy it?

If you're looking for a phone with a bit of high-end flavour on a super-tight budget, the Honor 5C is an excellent choice. As long as you don't mind the Honor software approach, there's nothing major to complain about here.

The main consideration is whether you might prefer the Moto G4, which costs £20 more but has a bigger screen, and a very pure take on Android.

• If you're in the market for a budget-to-mid-range phone along the lines of the Honor 5C, here are some other options you might want to consider…

Motorola Moto G4

Current budget champ the Moto G4 has a plainer plastic build, and costs a little more. However, many of you may prefer it.

Its rear camera is slightly better, and rather than having a custom interface it uses standard Android, with just a couple of Moto additions. The Moto G4 also has a larger screen, which is a pro for those who love mobile gaming and watching videos on their phones, but it also means it's more of a pocket-filler.

• Read our review of the Motorola Moto G4

Honor 5X

For just a little more money than the Honor 5C, the 5X features a fingerprint scanner and a larger 5.5-inch screen. In a pure tech-to-cash equation, the Honor 5X beats almost everything else out there in this price range.

As on the Honor 5C, the display is great too. At first it's hard to pick faults with this phone, aside from the fact that its metal body doesn't seem all that premium – a bit like the Honor 5C, then.

However, the Honor 5X actually feels slower than the 5C in use, though. It's a bit more laggy, which is a real shame.

• Read our review of the Honor 5X

iPhone SE

Unless you buy a second-hand iPhone, your best 'budget' bet from the Apple catalogue is the iPhone SE. Look at the price, though, and you'll see that it's not really in the same league as the Honor 5C. At £359 / $399 the iPhone is much, much more expensive.

In return you get the look and feel of a true high-end phone, and a much better camera. It's a real lesson in how much more you have to pay for an iPhone, though – unless, as mentioned, you find a stellar refurb deal or are happy with a preowned phone. 


• Read our review of the iPhone SE

Sony Xperia M5

Much like the iPhone SE, the Sony Xperia M5 is a reminder of just how good a deal phones like the Honor 5C and Motorola Moto G4 are. The Sony Xperia M5 is a lot more expensive, and unless you're going to use a lot of the phone's features extensively, you may not see that extra cash in action.

Upgrades include more advanced cameras front and back, and an extra gigabyte of RAM. However, when the Honor 5C's performance is surprisingly solid, it's only those cameras that are really worth considering – unless you have stacks of cash to play with.

• Read our review of the Sony Xperia M5