Into the intense heat of the dog-eat-dog mobile market in India, slips in the Honor 5C, a smartphone one could consider for some reasons - or leave aside in favour of the competition for others.
Easy To HoldThe Honor 5C is a bit smaller than the standard 5.5-inch device today. It has a 5.2 inch Full HD display and believe me that 0.3 portion of an inch less makes a visible difference. It immediately makes the phone easier to hold and use one-handed. Huawei has in any case done much to make the device ergonomics friendly -- and succeeded. The rounded sides make it easy to hold nice and firmly. The phone has a very solid build as well, and if it's a little heavy, it's probably because of the 3,000mAh battery which does fine, lasting the day. It's not specially slippery and the grip is good enough to reduce the chances of drops.
Understated Elegance
As with all phones, it's the back that spells out the design. A brushed metal finish gives it a great look, making it look worth more than its Rs,10,999. I saw the grey version which is understated and elegant with the fingerprint sensor and camera neatly aligned on the back and the Honor logo subtly placed towards the bottom. It would do well for someone looking for a 'sober' looking phone to take to work. There's a silver and a gold version available as well.
Short Of PerfectI wasn't impressed with the screen. It's bright, but brittle in some way and doesn't have the best viewing angles. It has a certain lack of vividly that makes it something you don't look at with pleasure. But it is workable. Definitely not the ideal thing for videos and gaming but fine for basic browsing and email and the like. The font size, at its largest, is still small compared with the difference you see on other phones.
The camera app on this device is rather nice with lots of controls which are easy to get to. The 13MP main camera is not bad. Outdoors in good light, the colours are good and there's even some depth of field. It isn't very fast or sharp though. Indoors, the pictures break up in low light but are otherwise perfectly usable.
Fast, Not FuriousThe Honor 5C does have decent sound and good call quality. It's running on a much talked about processor, the Kirin 650, made by Huawei itself, with 2GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage (plus memory card slot). The OS is Android 6.0. I found moving around the phone and multitasking good enough but a bit of stutter and jerkiness when browsing. On benchmark tests, the 5C does very well indeed, but it's just with browsing that I found myself less than happy. The fingerprint sensor works well and fast. It supports 4G VoLTE and is a Dual Micro Sim.
Pluses & MinusesThe 5C's size is to its advantage because it's becoming tougher to find anything smaller than 5.5 inches. So is the solid build and design. Performance is adequate and the camera is workable. But the 5C has an enormous amount of competition, specially from the extremely popular Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. Also the Lenovo ZUK Z1 and phones from LeEco, Asus and Gionee. It's tough going.
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
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