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Honor 5C Quick Review, Camera Samples, Gaming and Benchmarks

Honor has launched its latest budget smartphone Honor 5C in India today. It features a 5.2 inch full HD IPS LCD display and an octa-core Kirin 650 processor. The Honor 5C is priced at INR 10,999 and it will be available in Gold, Silver and Grey colour. The first flash sale will commence on 30th of June, and registrations have started today onwards.

We have been testing this device from quite a while now, although we did not unbox it but we did test it for camera and gaming. It offers great specs on paper, but is it good enough for all your need? Lets find out.

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Honor 5C Specifications

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Honor 5C Photo Gallery

Honor 5C Physical Overview

Honor 5C comes packed in a metal shell, with curved edges in a unibody structure. Due to its 5.2 inch display size, holding on to the phone is quite comfortable and one handed usage is not an issue if you have big hands. It feels really solid and the finishing is top class. Front of the phone looks a lot like what we have seen before but it manages to balance this with the premium looking back.

The front looks a lot like we have seen on phones like Redmi Note 3 or previous Honor phones. It has thin bezels on sides, with almost no black border, which is a good thing. Bottom bezel looks thick at first but once you use it, you’ll realize that the absence of navigation keys make it look thicker.

Top bezel has speaker grill in the middle, front camera on its right and proximity & ambient light sensor on the left corner.

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The back of the phone has two lines running across the width of the phone on the top and the bottom that joins from the sides and gives it an industrial look. You will find the camera lens, LED flash and a fingerprint sensor. Further towards the bottom, you will find the Honor logo and some regulatory information.

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Coming to the sides, you will find the hybrid SIM card tray on the left side of the phone.

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On the right side, you will find the power button and the volume rocker.

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The top of the phone houses the 3.5 mm audio jack. Additionally, it also has the secondary mic for noise cancellation.

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The bottom of the 5C houses the microUSB port and sual grills out of which, one is for mic and other is for loudspeaker.Honor 5c (10)

Honor 5C User Interface

The Honor 5C is the first Honor smartphone to come with Android Marshmallow, straight out of the box. It also has a skin of Honor’s Emotion UI 4.1 layered on top. This time, the company has done slight changes in the look and feel and the UI feels smoother this time.

It offers you a bunch of features that are useful but it still continues to have some irrelevant and useless options that we have spoken about in previous Honor phones. Although this time the EmUI feels much smoother and easier to use.

Honor 5C Camera Overview

The Honor 5C comes with a 13 MP camera on the back with f/2.0 aperture and a LED flash. We took it out and tested in different lighting conditions. Overall, the results were very good. Focusing was very quick, and it processed the image in no time. It captured good amount of details and adequate colours in bright lights but like any other smartphone camera, it suffered in low lighting conditions.

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I was happy to see the front camera doing well with the 8 MP sensor. I have experienced glitchy cameras in this segment when it comes to the secondary camera, but one thing that impressed me about the Honor 5C is the smoothness. Front camera captures good looking selfies in good lights and even better in natural lights.

Another interesting aspect of the Honor 5C camera is its software. The camera UI offers bunch of modes and filters to play with your camera. Moreover, it has features like recording Slow motion and time lapse videos.

Camera Samples

Gaming Performance

The Honor 5C comes with a 16nm octa-core Kirin 650 processor and 2 GB of RAM. To test the gaming performance, we installed and played Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt 8 on the phone. With graphics level set to medium, we experienced no issues in the gaming performance. Modern Combat 5 was a smooth experience but Asphalt was not as smooth as we have seen on high end flagship phones, but that doesn’t mean it is not playable. There were no major frame drops and the overall performance was very satisfactory considering the price and the RAM size of the phone.

After playing Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt 8 one after the other for 45 minutes, we experienced a 19% drop in the battery level. The phone did not heat up much – the temperature we recorded was 41.2 degree celsius, but this will vary depending on the type of game and the room temperatures on your side.

Honor 5C Benchmarks

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Conclusion

Honor 5c is a good phone with all the features you need from a phone of this price range. The best part is that it provides quality hardware and software to make the deal sweeter. There are few compromises made by the company and one of them is the 2 GB of RAM, especially when smartphones have 3 GB RAM on average. But that does not set it back; it has a beautiful display, great cameras and a premium look.

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Abhishek Bhatnagar

Abhishek Bhatnagar, a known technology blogger & YouTuber from India. A Software Engineer by qualification, now he works as the editor-In-Chief, Webmaster, & Managing Director at Gadgets To Use. He runs a number of other technology websites as well.