Honor 7 vs Honor 5X: A battle between two mid-range Huawei Honor siblings

The Huawei Honor 5X went on sale in Europe last week at £189.99 (AU$385 or US$276) and its sibling, the Honor 7 Premium Edition - debuted back in August - will soon hit European countries, confirmed Huawei.

So which phone should you get? We compare and review two of the latest Honor-branded smartphones to help you make your decision.

Display and design

The Honor 5X features a 5.5-inch display with 1920 x 1080 resolution (401ppi), while the Honor 7 sports a slightly smaller 5.2-inch 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, which makes it more durable.

Both handsets offer unibody metal designs and come in three colour options – Grey, Silver and Gold. According to a review by Android Authority, the Honor 7 offers more customisable shortcuts while launching apps.

Processor and hardware

In this department, the Huawei Honor 7 again takes a lead. The smartphone is equipped with its own HiSilicon Kirin 935 SoC. The chipset has eight Cortex-A53 cores with four clocked at 2.2GHz and four at 1.5GHz.

The Honor 7 also comes packed with a Mali-T628 GPU, which would deliver better graphics performance than the Adreno 405 GPU of the Honor 5X.

On the other hand, the Honor 5X is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 616 processor. The chipset also constitutes eight cores but with lower clock speeds of 1.5GHz and 1.2GHz respectively.

Moreover, the Honor 7 features 3GB of RAM as compared to 2GB in Honor 5X. The former also offers 16GB, 32GB or 64GB storage options, whereas the Honor 5X comes with only a 16GB storage for all variants.

Camera

The Honor 5X is shipped with a 13-megapixel shooter with f/2.0 aperture along with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera unit. In comparison, the Honor 7 touts a whopping 20MP wide-angle lens with f/2.0 aperture coupled with a reasonable 8MP front shooter.

Battery

The Honor 7 houses 3,100mAh batteries as compared to a 3,000mAh cell for the Honor 5X. However, a battery review by Android Central notes that the Snapdragon-powered Honor 5X fared batter than its sibling.

Other features

Both the Huawei Honor 7 and Honor 5X come with a fingerprint scanner placed below the camera, although it cannot be used for Android Pay. In the case of the Honor 7, the sensor can be used to launch an app or make a phone call. On the other hand, for Honor 5X, the fingerprint scanner can be used to open apps, dismiss an alarm, answer incoming calls and even snap a picture.

Both the devices run Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with EMUI 3.1 on top. Huawei India already rolled out Marshmallow to Honor 7. In December, Huawei launched the Honor 7 Enhanced Edition with Marshmallow onboard in China.

In terms of connectivity, the Huawei Honor 7 offers a wide variety of options including Wi-Fi n/ac, Bluetooth, NFC, infrared and LTE Cat 6 band. However, the Honor 5X only supports Wi-Fi and LTE Cat 4 and does not come with NFC (Near Field Communication).

Overall winner: Unsurprisingly, the Huawei Honor 7 seems to outshine its cheaper sibling.

In 2015, Huawei shipped more than 100 million smartphones , leaving behind contemporary tech giants like Apple and Samsung. This year, the Shenzhen-based company will try to enhance sales by steadily expanding its low and mid-range handsets in the Western European markets.

Related: Huawei GX8 arrives in the US, priced at US$350