The Huawei Honor 5X Review: Mid-Range Meets Maturity

Battery Life

There was a time where mid range smartphones ended up sacrificing battery life due to various factors, including less efficient display panels, SoCs made on older manufacturing nodes, and batteries that weren't able to keep up with the amount of power being used. Things have improved somewhat, although there are still circumstances where a mid range phone to aim a bit too high with its specs and compromise battery life as a result, such as what happened with the ASUS Zenfone 2. The Honor 5X doesn't pack the most powerful SoC available, but it is shipping with a relatively large, bright, and high resolution LCD display. To evaluate the Honor 5X's battery life in various scenarios I've run it through our suite of battery benchmarks, which includes our own WiFi web browsing test, along with the battery benchmarks included with BaseMark OS II, GFXBench 3.0, and PCMark.

The Honor 5X does fairly well in our WiFi web browsing benchmark. It comes in at just under ten hours, which puts it well above the Huawei P8 Lite and the Zenfone 2. It doesn't last as long as Motorola's smartphones though, which is mostly a function of the 5X's larger and higher resolution display.

The Honor 5X lasts quite a long time in BaseMark OS II's battery test. Of course, things have to put in context with this test, as it's a variable workload test. It's arguable that a device like the iPhone 6s which maintains a much higher level of performance during the duration of the test will obviously last a shorter time, and that it's better to perform well for a shorter time than to perform just decently for a longer time. That being said, when you look at the Honor 5X and compare it to similar devices like the Moto G and Huawei's own P8 Lite, it's clear that it provides better longevity in a CPU heavy workload. The comparison between it and the Snapdragon 615 based P8 Lite is actually quite interesting, as the Honor 5X only has a 36% larger battery but lasts 75% longer.

The Honor 5X is right in the middle of the chart for PCMark's work battery life test, which is a good indicator of battery life during mixed usage. It's again worth noting that a device like the Moto G lasts much longer due to its very large battery relative to the power usage of its components, but compared to your average smartphone the Honor 5X does just fine here.

In GFXBench's T-Rex HD unlimited battery test the Honor 5X lasts for 4.23 hours, which is the best result I've seen for a Snapdragon 600 series device. The Moto E and Moto G both last much longer, but they also perform significantly worse during the duration of the test, so again we're getting into the discussion of how it's better to actually run a game properly for a shorter time than to produce an unplayable frame rate for a long time. In this case, the Honor 5X actually can't run the T-Rex HD test at a constant 30fps either, mainly due to its native 1080p resolution. However, it should be significantly more capable of playing more basic 3D games that may render at a lower resolution than devices with Adreno 305 and 306. At 1080p it maintains a frame rate of slightly under 15fps for basically the entire duration, with power related throttling impacting performance right near the very end.

Overall I think that the Honor 5X provides a sufficient battery lifetime to get you through each day before having to recharge. Since the CPU and GPU aren't that fast you don't really have to worry about apps that strain those parts of the system draining your battery quickly, although the trade-off is that some of those apps just won't be usable in general. PCMark's battery test is a good indicator of battery life with a real life mixed use workload, and in that test the Honor 5X sits right in the middle, which is where you'd expect a mid range phone to be.

Charge Time

Since the Honor 5X provides relative good battery life there's not a pressing need to provide super fast charging, as charging will typically be done overnight over a period of 8-10 hours. Interestingly enough, Huawei does market the Honor 5X as supporting 2A fast chargers, but it ships with a standard 5W charging block. Given that buyers of a $199 phone are probably not going to spend $20-40 buying an additional quick charging block, the charge time that most users experience will be the one provided by the charger included in the box.

With its 5W charger the Huawei Honor 5X takes about 4.62 hours to charge from 0 to 100%. For whatever reason I was getting some erroneous data from the Honor 5X when polling data to graph the input power and charge over time, and so I've omitted that graph to avoid inaccurately characterizing it. 4.62 hours is quite a long time, but when you pair a 3000mAh (11.4Whr) battery with a 5W charger it's not surprising that a phone takes a long time to charge. Considering the $200 price tag it's not really a deal breaker, but having a 10W charger included would be nicer.