Huawei IDEOS X5 - Review, Features & More

Huawei is on a smartphone launching spree and has and has quivered the market with yet another budget smart phone Huawei X5. The phone comes with features, you will get in a smart phone thrice as priced as X5.

Let us have a sneak peak of the phone and see how cost cutting does judgment to it.

Design

Huawei X5 has a 3.8 inch WVGA capacitive touch but unlike latest Samsung and HTC phones, it does not have super AMOLED and LCD screen. The touch responsiveness is not extraordinary but it surely gives tough competition to budget phones of other brands.

We can see a bit of cost cutting in the exterior as the phone covers itself with a soft-touch plastic cover. It gives a good grip to hand and the stiff glossy plastic trim bordering the screen is good to look at. There are no hard buttons below the screen but a row of touch buttons which redirects to various features of phone. It has a 5 Megapixel camera with LED flash on the rear side, an external speaker and a start button.

The 1500mAh battery is below the battery cover with a SIM card slot and a micro SD memory card reader with 8 GB memory.

User experience

X5 comes bundled with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) minus the customized user experience, where we guess Huawei has saved a fortune. On booting the phone responds with the basic Android screen. The phone gives full power to customize it your way. Installing “Go Launcher” app to the blank canvas dresses up the phone in those elegant ways you could easily find in HTC or Samsung.

The phone features multi touch support for tow inputs. The pinch-to-zoom is active in browser and image gallery. The keyboard is blessed with swipe which can be activated by changing keyboard settings.

Features

Modes of communication in X5 include quad-band GSM (2G) networks 850/900/1800/1900 and dual-band UMTS (3G) 900/2100. Before buying the phone one thing to keep in mind is, it is incompatible with the Next G portion of Telstra's network. There's also a Bluetooth supporting the standard range of wireless audio profiles Wi-Fi onboard and a GPS receiver. In short, X5 all the must haves communiqué features of a smart phone.

The 5 megapixel camera gives pictures of acceptable quality and sharpness in day light. X5 has tethering option minus Wi-Fi hotspot using 3G data, but casual users won’t miss it too much.
The X5 can play H.264 and WMV video files and MP3, AAC and WMA audio. There is no media sharing app or HDMI output on the X5, therefore a third party app or a built in device must be needed to fulfill the purpose.

Performance

Huawei X5 has made its own position when speaking about performance, though a number of smart phones got released in last two years but X5 lies in an acceptable range among them.

While using phone we haven’t come across performance glitches in the phone, it has given solid performance in majority of cases. Call quality and signal reception is great, and earpiece speaker is loud enough to make calls.

Overall

Huawei has once again enchanted us by giving some features that are mostly find in phones with price twice or thrice of X5. 8GB micro SD Card included in X5 gives a sense of completeness to it. X5 could be the best choice for users looking for a decent smartphone and yet not in the mood of investing a fortune in it.