Huawei Y5 (2017): Full, in depth review

Name: Huawei Y5 (2017): Full, in depth review
Item: Huawei Y5 (2017): Full, in depth review
Rating: 2.00
Author: Fergus Halliday

Fergus Halliday

PC World

@Cvamped

21/09/17

Expert Rating

2.00 / 5

Pros

Easy Key
Camera is feature rich and decent for the price

Cons

Performance often drags
Mediocre battery life

Bottom Line

The Y5 is Huawei’s cheapest smartphone of the year, and it’s got the look, feel and performance to match that mantle.

Would you buy this?

Price
$ 199.00 (AUD)

Performance

While my time with the Y5 did come on the back of reviewing two ultra-fast, high-performance flagship devices (the Nokia 8 and OnePlus 5 ), I couldn’t help but come away a little disappointed here. Sure, the Y5 is a budget phone but apps still take far too long to load - and it doesn't help that the touchscreen proves itself so frequently unresponsive.

The Y5 runs on Android Marshmallow - which is now several years old - however, it doesn’t seem to net any major performance gains from relying on the older OS. Multitasking was technically supported but pretty much out of the realm of possibility due to the drag it generated concerning usability.

When it came to benchmarks, the Y5 didn’t exactly blow us away. Overall, it scored well within the same ballpark of the competition. While it didn’t outperform the slightly-better (and slightly more expensive) Y7 - it did take Moto’s E4 and the new Nokia 3 down a few notches.

Still, my gut instinct is that it's worth spending a little bit more to get some of the gutsier budget or mid-tier devices like the Oppo F1s or Huawei’s own GR5.