Honor 5A is the continuation of their budget-centric smartphones. This time around, Honor stepped up their game in the budget smartphones compared to the previous Huawei Y6. Let’s take a look at what the Honor 5A has to offer.
Its box has a pretty standard Honor-style here. Blue box with the Honor logo embossed. I was expecting the word “5A” to be printed somewhere on the front too, but that didn’t happen. The only part that it says “Honor 5A” is at the back, where the serial number is found.
Honor included the least amount of things as possible, as our unboxing shows. There’s the Honor 5A itself wrapped in a plastic bag, a micro USB cable, a wall charger, and some documentation.
That’s pretty much it. I can understand why Honor didn’t include some other accessories. However, that’s another story for another day.
[nextpage title=”Design”]
While being an entry-level smartphone, the Honor 5A doesn’t fail to disappoint in terms of aesthetics. The one that I’ve got here is the white colour version, and I think it accentuates its beauty very well.
As you can see above, this white Honor 5A is generally white, but has a gold rim around its edge. I find this really appealing, considering that the gold hue compliments the white colour. Also, take a look at the back.
Ah, the wondrous interlacing design. The entire pattern is laid upon a hard plastic back. It’s quite easily seen – just need to reflect light in a slightly slanted angle. I have to say, thanks Honor for making our boring entry-level phones look great!
Actually, I can feel this texture with my finger too. It’s not really significant – but a slight bump can be felt over each line. Does it feel good? Definitely! I absolutely love this design, but I think it’ll be better if it’s made out of a combination of glossy and sandstone material. Better grip, yet it looks absolutely stunning.
On the left side of the Honor 5A, nothing can be found there. It’s absolutely flushed clean. On the right side however is where the power and volume rocker can be found. They’re both textured and placed quite close together, so differentiating them will be quite an issue at first.
At the top is where the usual 3.5mm audio jack is found. Somewhere in between the camera and the 3.5mm audio jack is where the secondary microphone is found. Pretty standard layout.
At the bottom however is where the microUSB port is found alongside with a microphone and speaker grill. Again, it has mono speakers. Only the right side grill is the real speaker.
[nextpage title=”Connectivity”]
In the recent months of smartphones, there’s one thing that always bugged me – SIM 2 and microSD card slot sharing the same slot. Luckily, the Honor 5A did not commit such sin. Just have a look at the lower half of the Honor 5A and look for a small notch, then pry open the backplate from there.
Opening the back cover reveal nothing much. The speaker can be seen at the lower part, then there’s a big metal plate covering the not-so-easily-removable battery. At the top of the Honor 5A is where the microSIM and microSD card slots are found. They have their own dedicated slots, of course. That’s a pretty huge deal!
[nextpage title=”Display”]
There’s nothing spectacularly special here. The Honor 5A packs a 5.5-inch 720p display, which presumably uses IPS LCD panel.
Although the resolution on the Honor 5A isn’t spectacular, the colours however do pop out. They’re very vivid, and in a way has better calibration than some other smartphones with 5.5-inch 720p IPS LCD out there.
On the subject of brightness, I personally think it’s adequately bright, but suffers from reflection issues while using it under bright daylight. Would that be an issue though? I highly doubt it.
[nextpage title=”Camera”]
Then comes the camera. Which I think is one of the essentials in smartphones these days. Sporting a 13MP f/2.0 rear-facing camera, it takes some pretty decent pictures. Now, the camera isn’t anything spectacular – and by today’s standard, it’s pretty basic actually.
The pictures taken are indeed decent for social media purposes. In dimly-lit conditions, the camera is quite noisy, whereas the noise levels are pretty low in bright places. The one big issue I have is the colour reproduction. It’s very washed-out. Again, I have no idea why., but the colours are pretty dull.
I mean, just look at the orange power bank there with the Xiaomi LED. It’s not as vivid as it should. And heck, even the texts have gone really fuzzy upon zooming in. However if you don’t zoom it, it looks pretty decent. Again, the Honor 5A’s camera isn’t meant to take pictures in a split second, but it takes some decent pictures for social media.
As for the front-facing camera however, there’s an 8MP sensor with a lens with undisclosed aperture value. The picture quality okay, and it’s the standard Huawei/Honor selfie camera features too. I look too dang pretty on selfies though.
[nextpage title=”Software”]
The Honor 5A sports the exact same version of EmotionUI 4.1(or EMUI for short) as the Honor 8 that we reviewed here. Is it good? Better than before of course, but improvements can still be made. Especially when there are some UI erros with non-standard notification items like Google Maps.
Everything about the EMUI 4.1 on the Honor 5A is the same as the Honor 8, just that there’s no IR blaster or knuckle gesture.
Oh by the way – there’s no fingerprint sensor on the Honor 5A. That’s why we never mentioned anything about it, obviously.
[nextpage title=”Performance”]
Performance on the Honor 5A is pretty decent, actually. It scores an impressive 54.1FPS on Epic Citadel, but only in High Quality. For some reason, I can’t turn on the highest quality setting on the Honor 5A – and I’ve seen this issue on only a handful of devices thus far.
Should you be worried though? Not really. I can presume that the FPS floats around at about 40-ish FPS. It should perform just a little less as the ASUS ZenFone 3 Max, actually.
After running the Epic Citadel test a few times consecutively, I jumped on over to CPU-Z and look at the temperatures. I’m very surprised that it kept everything below 45℃ all the time! This is definitely good news, as we’ve discussed here on why smartphone batteries nowadays last longer even though they have the same battery capacitiy as before.
Then comes the Vellamo test. While the test doesn’t tell us much in a real-life scenario, I can translate them for you. All I can say is this – the Honor 5A performs admirably. Day-to-day usage is fine, it doesn’t lag much, but it definitely is a split second slower when launching the app menu app when compared to other flagship smartphones that easily costs double the Honor 5A. Not a big deal, in my opinion.
[nextpage title=”Battery”]
When it comes to the battery life, the Honor 5A can score pretty good operating time too on PCMark for Android.
Looking at the benchmark scores and the battery life it gives, all I can say is that the scores here aren’t the highest. That’s completely fine, because the Honor 5A isn’t supposed to be the smartphone with the best benchmark scores anyway. The most important part is its battery life. It can run the benchmark continuously for nearly 8 hours straight!
For the price, I think the Honor 5A is great. However, the charger is the biggest problem I have with the Honor 5A.
Sure, the charger is collapsible and compact, but the problem is the output. At 5V 1A, this is indeed the bare minimum charging wattage. I mean, it’s not the end of the world, because even the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus includes a 5V 1A charger too. It’s just that with a 5V 1A charger, it’ll take the longest time to charge. And mostly you’ll have to adapt to the life of “plug it in to charge before I sleep” lifestyle.
I’ve gotten used to this lifestyle actually, and I prefer it this way.
[nextpage title=”Wrap Up”]
The Honor 5A. It’s definitely a smartphone that caught my eyes with just a glance. Having a smartphone at this price point, it just doesn’t seem possible, especially coming from Huawei – the company that made the Huawei P9 and Honor 8 (which we reviewed here). The Honor 5A just doesn’t look like what’s it’s priced at – it should be priced a lot higher.
For a smartphone that costs RM600-ish, I think the Honor 5A paved a spot for itself in the budget spectrum that is flooded with smartphones.
Wanna get yourself a Honor 5A? Click here to find a special deal over at Lazada – you’ll get a free tempered glass, free 16GB microSD card slot, and another free selfie stick – all for just RM 629 for the gold version, and RM 599 for the black version!
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