HUAWEI launches budget friendly honor 5A

The China Netcom version uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor while the second variant uses Hauwei’s own Kirin 620. Both processors have octa-core CPUs using ARM’s Cortex-A53 cores. The Snapdragon 617 has an Adreno 405 GPU, while the Kirin 620 uses an ARM Mali-450 GPU. Both variants have 2GB of RAM, and like the honor 4A and the 5X, the 5A has 16GB of internal storage that is expandable using a microSD card.

In terms of the display, the 5A uses a 5.5 inch LCD IPS panel with a 720p resolution. The use of a 1280 x 720 resolution on a 5.5 inch display will mean that the pixel density is quite low, however remember that this is a budget device.

Compared to the honor 4A, the 5A has some major camera upgrades. The rear facing camera now uses an 13MP sensor from Sony, while the front facing camera now uses an 8MP sensor, up from the rather feeble 2MP camera on the previous generation.

The honor 5A comes with a 3,100 mAh non-removable battery and probably won’t include any quick charging technology. If the 5A is anything like the 5X, then the battery life should be very impressive. During our review of the honor 5X the device managed close to 6 hours of screen-on time.

On the software side of things, the honor 5A is running HUAWEI’s EMUI 4.1 out of the box, based on Android 6 Marshmallow. EMUI is a heavy skin on top of Android, so you won’t see a lot of Material Design elements in this user interface, and there won’t be an app drawer.

So with a better processor, more RAM, more internal storage, and better cameras, the honor 5A is a significant upgrade. However this is still a budget device, so there are some high-end features which are missing, most noticeably NFC, a fingerprint reader, and support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi (however it does support 802.11 a/b/g/n  at 2.4GHz).

The honor 5A will be available in China soon (maybe as early has June 17) from ¥ 699 (which is around USD $106). There is already a listing on China’s Vmall website. It will come in six colors, including white, black, blue, pink, yellow, and gold.