Huawei Honor 5c: A flawless execution with an impressive 16nm processor

Huawei Honor 5c is the latest entry by Huawei into the crowded smartphone market in India. We’ve been using the Huawei Honor 5c for a while now, and we are very impressed with it.

Design

Starting with the design, it is a job well done. The Huawei Honor 5c has a 5.3 Inch 1080P display and weighs around 153 grams. On the back, it has a metal finish with tiny amounts of plastic at the top and bottom for the antennas. It has a curved finish, making it feel natural in your hands. The first thing you realise when you hold the device is that it just has that right balance between the design and feel of the device.

On the top, right above the screen, there’s the speaker grill and the camera. Below the screen there’s the HONOR branding and no physical buttons. On the left, there’s the SIM slot which can be accessed using an SIM Eject Tool. There’s the volume rocker and the power button on the right. At the bottom, there’s the Micro-USB slot for charging and syncing data, the microphone grill and speaker grill. On the top, there’s a tiny microphone hole to capture the background noise and one 3.5mm Headphone Jack.

Going to the back of Huawei Honor 5c, it is made of Brushed Aluminium which looks exquisite on the phone and smooth in hands. On the top, there’s the camera module which is protruding out. This is a design choice which is being done by all manufacturers and has to stop! It does not cause an inconvenience, but it just looks bad when compared to a phone with a flush finish. Right next to the camera module, there’s a single tone flash. Below the camera module, there’s a square fingerprint sensor. In the bottom of the phone, there’s the other Honor branding.

Internals

The phone runs on Huawei’s own Kirin 650 Octa -Core Processor. We’ll get back to this separately in the performance section. The Huawei Honor 5c has a memory of 2GB and 16GB Storage, which is expandable up to 128GB. For connectivity, the phone supports the usual things like 4G, GPS and Bluetooth 4.1.

The Huawei Honor 5c is a Dual-SIM phone which can be accessed using an SIM Eject tool on the left. Though the phone is a Dual-SIM phone, one of the SIM slots is a Hybrid Slot. Meaning, you can either have two Nano-SIMs or One Nano-SIM and One MicroSD card up to 128GB at the same time.

Performance

The phone runs on Huawei’s own processor, Kirin 650. It is an Octa-Core processor, in which four cores are clocked at 2.0Ghz and the remaining four at 1.7Ghz. Also, the Kirin 650 is a 16nm FinFET processor. This is something that is there on the latest flagship phones like the iPhone 6s or the S7 which runs on Snapdragon 820. Comparing the Huawei Honor 5c with other phones in this segment, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 2 runs on Snapdragon 650 and Snapdragon 652. Both these processors are 28nm Processor.

Click here to read why a 16nm processor is important and makes a difference.

The 16nm is not just a gimmick. It is very visible with a lot of the aspects of the phone like battery optimisations and the camera. Also, the Kirin 650 has an i5 processor which is always in Power ON mode. This ensures the phone wakes up a lot faster and improves the fingerprint sensor’s performance. Since it is always ON in low power mode, it can continuously collect data from various sensors. One of the use cases is the phone is constantly counting the number of steps you take using the accelerometer without using up the resources.

Apart from the impressive processor, the phone comes with 2GB RAM. 2GB is not a lot, but it should be enough to get everyday tasks done. It definitely lacks when you’re switching between a lot of apps.

Battery

The Huawei Honor 5c comes with a 3,000mAh battery. This is not a lot, but we easily got a bit more than one day of heavy usage and two days with light usage. Also, the phone does not heat up with continuous usage or intensive gaming. All of this, thanks to the software optimisation and most importantly, the 16nm processor. Huawei claims the Kirin 650 consumes 70% lesser power than their previous processor, Kirin 620. Click here to read why the 16nm processor makes a real difference in the battery performance.

Fingerprint

The Huawei Honor 5c comes with Fingerprint 2.0 which is much better than the fingerprint sensors on the previous Huawei Phones we’ve used. It takes less than a second to unlock the phone, and it has a high level of accuracy. Huawei has done a lot of software level integrations for the Fingerprint Sensor. The fingerprint sensor to do things like Shoot Photos/Videos, Answer Calls, Pull down the notifications panel or lock down specific apps and folders.

Once again, the Kirin 650 plays a prominent role with the fingerprint sensor of the Huawei Honor 5c. The processor has a separate module to store your fingerprints, and other apps can not access it.

Camera

The Huawei Honor 5c has a 13MP primary camera and 8MP camera. These are some of the best cameras we’ve ever used on a phone in this segment! The camera performs well in auto mode. It has a Pro mode, which lets you adjust the settings, the way you would on an SLR. With this mode, the phone is capable of taking some incredible shots and to be honest, I never expected it to be this good. Once again, the 16nm Kirin 650 processor plays a crucial role. It has a dedicated ISP which processes the images much better than other phones. Also, the colours are not very saturated, something that is very common on phones these days.

Check out some of the shots we took:

Under Broad Daylight

Daylight

Low Light

Low Light, Food

Medium Light, Food

Artificial Light

Day Light

Day Light

Medium Light, Zoomed In

Medium Light

Medium Light

Very Little, Close to no Light

Front camera, Indoors

Software

The Huawei Honor 5c runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Huawei’s own custom skin EUI 4.1. If you’ve used the previous versions of EUI, everything should be familiar. There’s not a lot of bloatware, but just a few extra apps which can replace the stock apps like Music and Calendar. It is up to you to use Google’s version of these apps or Huawei’s. One significant change is that EUI 4.1 is incredibly stable. There are no lags, and it is butter smooth now. Everything feels very natural and as always, EUI is heavily customizable for your needs!

Conclusion

The Huawei Honor 5c is a phone that I’m genuinely surprised with. It works faster, shoots better photos and has an amazing battery life. All of this because of the 16nm Kirin 650. The Processor Size does not always mean better performance. It depends on other factors like the processor design. But in the case of Huawei Honor 5c, the 16nm processor makes a real difference!

The Huawei Honor 5c comes in in three different colours: Gold, Silver and Grey. It is priced at Rs. 10,999, placing it right with the Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 2. But all these phones offer different things. The Huawei Honor 5c offers an incredible performance and an amazing battery life, thanks to the Flaghship level 16nm Kirin 650. Click here to buy the Huawei Honor 5c right now from Flipkart.

Check out our video review below: