Honor 5C Smartphone First Impressions

The current state of Indian smartphone market is that many companies are just blindly launching smartphones with a specification war. They don’t even take a step to optimize the user experience on their handsets let alone take feedback from its users. Though, I’m glad that there are some certain jewels among a large number of smartphone brands that have risen all above this specification war and think about user experience before launching their handsets. Honor is one such brand.

Online brand of Huawei, the Honor, hasn’t been around for a long time but have garnered a lot of attention of consumers in all sorts of smartphones ranging from affordable to mid to high-end products. It has products in all of them. Most of all they are aggressively priced. Today is one such occasion when Honor is defying the industry standards and launching a revolutionary product.

Meet the Honor 5C. It is company’s latest mid-range offering at an affordable price tag. We have had this device for a while now, and you can read our first impressions of the device. Do make a note that it is not a review, but our initial impressions of the few days’ usage. For an in-depth review, you would have to wait a couple more days.

Build Quality

Honor 5C sports a fresh yet familiar design as you can see some reminiscence to the Honor 7 design language, which is not a bad thing. Because we liked that design, moreover, offering such sturdy build quality of device in the range is a rare occurrence. With an aircraft-grade aluminum construction, you get the premium looking handset at the considerably lower end of price. The Unibody design doesn’t allow you to remove back cover and battery. You’ll find ports, as well as buttons placement completely ideal as volume rocker keys and button placements, are easy to reach while operating one-handedly. Overall, the device offers pretty good design and is comfortable in hands, all thanks to its ideal screen size.

Vibrant Display

The display on the Honor 5C is pretty vibrant as it sports a 5.2-inch real estate with 1080p pixel resolution, which has become the standard in this range. The pixel density of the screen is at 423 PPI (Pixel Per Inch) that is more than enough. Talking about the viewing angles on the device, well, the content looks pretty much great in every angle, even under sunlight. The display shows true-to-life colors and with good brightness and contrast level. It feels fantastic to watch 1080p YouTube videos on this screen. Even the display enthusiasts will like the output on this display. On top of amazing picture quality, you don’t have to worry about leaving your fingerprints on it.

Recommended Read: Kirin 650 Vs Snapdragon 820 Processor

Performance

The brand has been touting its Kirin 650 processor a lot; it is a second chipset and handset in the world to sport a chipset that has a 16 nm (FinFET Plus) manufacturing node. This technology boasts incredible performance and power efficiency. Most of the chipset makers’ uses 28nm process in their mid-range handsets, while Honor using this revolutionary technology screams a lot that company wants to provide the best technology to the users at affordable pricing.

The Kirin 650 chipset is paired with a 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, which can be expanded up to 128GB via microSD card slot. Note that the internal storage used here is eMMC 5.1 based flash storage, which is said to have faster transfer rate. The device also sports a fingerprint sensor on the back side, which is not an ideal position for me, but I still admired the quick unlock feature. You just put your finger on the sensor, and it unlocks your device. Like Samsung handsets, you don’t have to press it. Overall, it offers good performance and multitasking to some extent.

EMUI 4.1

Regarding software experience, you are getting a custom Android skin on the Honor 5C, which company calls it as Emotion UI, coined as EMUI. The version that this handset is running on is EMUI 4.1, which is based on the Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It is probably the first handset from Honor to come out of the box with Android Marshmallow OS.

The interface feels pretty light and easy to operate with not much confusion. Though, first-time users would need some assistance in understanding the features. But most of the stuff is simple; you get all the apps on home screen, which is where I like. There are not many pre-installed apps on the device, apart from the default apps like File Manager, Music, Calendar, Gallery, Video and Phone Manager. Though, you would want to configure the Health app, which will calculate the steps taken and calories burnt.

First Impressions

After using it for couple days, I would say the device feels pretty great in hands. It has an extremely good build quality and with aircraft-grade aluminum construction, it surely makes you feel like you’re holding a premium handset. With a blazingly fast processor working in the backend to provide you with a multitasking power, you don’t feel like using a mid-ranger, considering the price point it comes with. I would say display output is also fantastic for the price bracket.

Stay Tuned in for the in-depth review of the device in the coming days as we test more features of the device.