Review: Honor 5C, not quite unique enough

WHAT is your opinion of the Honor smartphone brand?
 
Huawei goes to great lengths worldwide to disguise the fact that Honor belongs to the Chinese giant. Perhaps, they do not wish the brand to be tainted by the 'made in China' image.
 
To be fair, we have never had issues with any of the Honor devices. According to Huawei, the company sold over 40 million Honor phones in 2015 - double that of 2014. An impressive achievement in a slowing market.

The Honor 5C is now available from RM800. This puts the phone firmly in the same mid-price category as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and the Oppo F1s.
 
Design
 
Have we reached a point in smartphone design where innovation in design has completely ceased? Let us hope not.
 
If we compare the new Honor 5C with the older Redmi Note 3, except for the Honor logo, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. See the two phones side by side.
 

 

The Honor 5C has a thickness of 8.3mm and weighs 156 grams. As is the tradition these days, the phone has a brushed metal back. The fingerprint reader sits just below the tiny camera bulge. The volume and power buttons are on the right while the hybrid SIM tray is on the other side. At the bottom, two stereo speakers sit on either side of the microUSB port.
 
Display Matters
 
The Honor 5C has a 5.2-inch Full HD IPS LCD display. Although the phones may look almost identical in design, the Honor 5C display is noticeably brighter than the one on the Redmi Note 3 and in the same league as the Oppo F1.
 
Internal Hardware
 
It seems clear now that Huawei is moving away from dependence on foreign mobile CPU manufacturers like Qualcomm. The Honor 5C uses a HiSilicon Kirin 650 SoC, an octa-core chipset designed in-house.
 
The octa-core CPU is coupled with a Mali-T880MP2 GPU. Application memory is limited to 2GB. Storage is also limited to just 16GB. Fortunately, it can be expanded further up to 256GB using a microSD card in the second SIM tray.
 
This smartphone has a 13 megapixel rear camera and an eight megapixel front camera. Both the cameras have a f/2 aperture.
 
Battery and Performance
 
The battery rated at 3,000mAh, is about average for phones in this price range this year. Unfortunately, the phone does not support fast charging of any kind. Therefore, after the battery has fallen below ten percent, it takes a good two hours to get back to full charge. In our PCMark battery life test, the battery lasted six hours and 32 minutes. This puts the Honor 5C just a couple of minutes behind the Oppo F1s, but well behind the Redmi Note 3.
 
Application performance is similarly mediocre. In our 3DMark for Android tests, the Honor 5C was more than twice as slow as the Redmi Note 3, but about 40 percent faster than the Oppo F1s. We saw a similar result in the Antutu benchmark.
 
The rear camera has the same strengths and weaknesses of most smartphone cameras. While photos taken in daylight or bright light are very good, the night images are noticeably noisy and slightly fuzzy. Also, although the Honor 5C is more expensive and newer than the Redmi Note 3, the night photos are very similar.
 
Judge for yourself. See this photo taken below with the Redmi Note 3.
 

 

And this photo taken with the Honor 5C.

 

Software
 
The camera app in the Honor 5C is well-featured. It offers features like HDR, slow-motion video, time-lapse video and panorama.

 

A few words of caution. The Honor 5C uses Huawei's HiSuite to link the phone to a PC and transfer files. The HiSuite turned out to be a bit unstable. It crashed a few times before we were able to complete the transfer of the files.
 
Conclusion
 
Let us be clear. Priced below RM1,000, the Honor 5C is not a bad smartphone. But it falls between two stools. It is not as cheap and powerful as the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. Nor does it have a standout feature as the selfie-focussed Oppo F1s. For the price, it is also slightly below par in RAM and storage. Although it ticks all the boxes, none of the features are brilliant enough to get the phone to standout in a very crowded market.
 
Rating: 3 out of 5