Honor 5X review

Battery on the Huawei Mate 8 was one of the stand out features of the phablet and made it one of the best you can buy right now for giving an impressive innings off the charging cable. I was expecting big things from the Honor 5X for that exact reason, and I wasn't disappointed.

The Honor 5X gave me an astonishing amount of battery life and I never found myself going to bed empty when using the phone. The same can't be said for a lot of the larger manufacturers.

There was always enough charge on my phone to get me through the day no matter how much I was doing with it.

Our video test at techradar found the phone with 81% battery after running a 90 minute video on full brightness with full connectivity options on. That's the higher end of how the battery life on these phones can do and in fact it was even better than the Huawei Mate 8 that came out with 80% at the end.

The Honor 5X will allow you to watch a few full length movies without having to worry about the charge.

I also ran the test again at 50% brightness to see how much the screen was affecting the battery and it came out at the end of the test with 83% life. Not the biggest saving in battery, but it still shows how much you can save by turning it down a little.

But the thing to note with the Honor 5X was how much I was able to do with the phone and not have to worry about recharging half way through the day.

In a market where the Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6S as the most saught after phones it makes you sit back and realise that battery life can be improved with a little more effort from the manufacturers.

Honor is missing out on a few features here though with wireless and fast charging capabilities no-where to be seen.

Fast charging is a great feature when you need a little bit of extra juice and only have a few minutes to go into the mains. While wireless charging is becoming a much bigger deal with a number of cafes and restaurants even bringing the feature in.

It's great to be able to sit your phone down and not have to plug it in for a charge – but it's understandable why Honor hasn't seen fit to put this feature in here.

But hopefully in a couple of years, or maybe even months, we'll start to see features such as fast charging coming down to these cheaper handsets and not being reserve red for the realms of the flagship phones.