Huawei GR5 Review

Display and Multimedia

As said earlier, the GR5 sports a 5.5-inch screen with Full HD resolution or 401ppi. Colors are good with sufficient punch and vibrance. Viewing angles are decent but with some slight darkening when viewed from extreme angles. Still, the GR5’s display is still a joy to use when viewing photos and watching movies especially in Full HD.

The speaker, on the other hand, is not exactly impressive. It’s audible but sounds tinny and trebly. It’s good in emphasizing vocals but won’t deliver a great overall listening experience.

Camera

When it comes to imaging, the GR5’s 13 megapixel camera is no slouch and can produce images with plenty of detail and good colors especially in bright conditions. Selfies, on the other hand, is handled by a 5 megapixel shooter with wide-angle lens and on-screen flash for low-light scenarios. Quality is decent but not that impressive as it is susceptible to noise.

As for in-camera features, there are five modes immediately available in the UI namely, Good food, Beauty, Photo, Video, Time-lapse, as well as filters. Inside settings we have Panorama, HDR, All-focus, Best photo, Watermark, Slow-mo and Audio mode.

Video-wise, the GR5 can record at up to 1080p at 30fps in MP4 format. Quality is good with nice contrast, detail, and decent audio quality.

OS and Apps

Running the software department is Android 5.1 Lollipop skinned with Huawei’s EMUI 3.1. It uses on-screen navigation buttons, and like Xiaomi’s MIUI and OPPO’s ColorOS, it doesn’t use an app drawer and made all apps accessible directly from the home screen pages.

Although it has some aesthetic changes to make it different from other Android UI’s the EMUI 3.1 still behaves like your usual Lollipop device but add to that features you won’t normally find on stock. Below are the run down of some of its UI features:

* Phone Manager – RAM optimizer, storage cleaner, text and call blocker, network traffic manager, power manager, and app locking.
* “Simple” homescreen style
* Motion control – flip to mute, share to rearrange icons, double tap screen to turn on, draw letter to open apps
* Different navigation bar designs
* Shake to change homescreen wallpaper
* Smart unlock – lets you unlock your phone with a Bluetooth-enabled device like a smartwatch

When it comes to apps, we have the usual Google goodies in addition to Facebook, Clean Master, Facetune, WPS Office, and Shazam. The good thing is that these can be uninstalled. All in all, you’re getting 10.39GB of usable space out of the 16GB which you can expand further with a microSD card.

Next Page: Performance and Benchmarks / Battery Life / Conclusion