Huawei launched the budget Y5 Prime 2018, a successor to the last year’s Y5 to the market with a little improved design from its predecessor. But does it really succeed to the original Y5 from last year? that’s what you will know in this review.
First thing first, the new Huawei Y5 Prime 2018 costs PKR 15,500/- in Pakistan and replaces the last year’s Huawei Y5 2017. The new model has features like fullview display with 18:9 aspect ratio. The phone runs Android 8.1 Oreo and comes with 2GB of RAM along with 1.5GHz Quad-Core processor in a newer MediaTek chipset.
With those above key features, it indeed feels as an upgrade from from last year’s Y5 in pretty much similar price.
Unboxing
If you have missed, there is a separate unboxing session we did a week ago with initial impressions. With the purchase, you get a travel charger, the USB cable and the earphones along with the phone in the retail box.
Box items
- The Device: Huawei Y5 Prime 2018
- 5V/1A Charger
- microUSB cable for connectivity and charging
- Earphones with 3.5mm pin
- User Guide and Warranty Card
- Add-on screen protector plastic
- Free Zong 4G internet
Design and Build Quality
Even though the new Y5 Prime 2018 targets mass market of customers with low-budget, the phone adopts the design from Huawei’s mid-range lineup. In addition, the reduced bezels on top and bottom are good to attract its target customers.
If you actually compare it with the last year’s Y5 when there was no trend of adopting the wider screen with minimal bezels in low-end phones or even in mid-range, it’s a real upgrade for you. Just look at the the following, how much different they look.
On the back, the new Y5 Prime 2018 has no removable back cover as it’s a unibody design. That as well is a nice adoption for a low-end smartphone. You may want it to have a user-removable battery which is a good requirement but now it’s almost obsolete from most aspects. Comparatively, the 2017’s model had a removable back cover but still it didn’t allow you to replace batteries. So the new phone is better with a fully closed design and a SIM slot provided on the side of the phone like a very much standard now a days.
It’s always good to have a dedicated expandable memory card slot along side the two SIM card slots. So you can use all of them simultaneously – the two nano SIM cards and a microSD card.
The SIM card slot is on the left of the phone while on the right, there is a power button and a volume rocker.
The phone sure has a 3.5mm audio jack on top and a microUSB port on the bottom with a microphone. There is no dedicated loudspeaker
There are still ticker bezels on the side of the screen but the reduced top bezel hosts the earpiece which also works as a loudspeaker which is not that great. Alongside there is the front-camera and some hidden proximity and ambient light sensor.
On the chin, there is only a branding “Huawei”.
Software and User Interface
Huawei Y5 Prime comes with Android 8.1 Oreo out-of-the-box and company’s EMUI 8.0 with all those features that people loved to have in Huawei smartphones. There is no big difference in the user interface than the same software based other Huawei devices, however it differs a lot from its predecessor.
The software comes with Huawei’s traditional app launcher which has a clean home screens with app icons and folders. The other one is a more common launcher with an app drawer that mode can be enabled from settings. Choose as it suits you but this feature has been there since EMUI 5.1 and is available in devices running Android 7.1. No special thing about it right now.
There pre-built apps for you ease such as Phone Manager, which is something Huawei is shipping since long. You can get in there and manage various phone options specially the memory and storage. The app additionally provides access to battery and power management, notification center dropzone management and protected apps which allow you enable/disable apps from running in the background. More importantly you can use applocker right from the Phone manager to secure from unauthorized usage of certain apps.
System Performance
Compared to the predecessor, Huawei Y5 Prime 2018 has a newer chipset MediaTek MT6739 but unfortunately it’s not an upgraded version. Instead, I found the new Y5 Prime as a degraded model of its last year’s model.
The phone is powered by the same quad-core processor with Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. But unlike Mali-T720 MP2 GPU in Y5 2017, the new phone Y5 Prime 2018 comes with the PowerVR GE8100 GPU which has shown little lower benchmark ratings. I tried with AnTuTu and Geekbench and found them little lower on scores as well. 2GB RAM on the other hand isn’t managed well with this phone running Android Oreo.
Y5 Prime 2018 also gets a little bump of 20mAh in battery with 3020 mAh in total. It’s good to go day long, though it doesn’t have fast charging.
Camera
Huawei Y5 Prime 2018 features a bumped up 13-megapixel autofocus camera with dual-tone LED flash. The lens has f/2.0 aperture. The camera comes with the features like HDR mode, beauty and Panorama mode. The main camera takes shots of 4208×3120 maximum resolution at 4:3 aspect ratio. The phone records videos at 1080p or 720p. The front camera remains the same as 5MP as last year’s Y5.
On the performance side, the camera struggles with the focusing. Noise levels are also high and noticeable in dark spots while the HDR mode brings some detail but the overall image looks over sharpened. Highlight clipping is too often as dynamic range is poor.
With a little surprise of an upped camera resolution, the images from this camera are not any better than Huawei Y5 2017. Instead I mostly found them lesser than last year’s. For reference you can check Y5 2017’s images to understand what maximum this camera can achieve in good light. I’ll try to update this review with photos from Y5 Prime 2018 asap.
Conclusion
Y5 Prime 2018, where has some quick good looks to be a low-budget phone, it has some throwbacks which is not so impressive. Performance wise there is no improvement in the phone – in fact it feels less fluent than the last year’s Y5.
With all goods and bads, the new Y5 Prime 2018 isn’t really a healthy option to go for. Specially its performance let me down when have used the predecessor that wasn’t as bad. Thanks to the newer chipset with lower graded GPU.
With this price tag and improvement in visual aspects, this chipset is now common to ship in low-end smartphones. So you won’t having a good option to buy in this price range. I’ll still recommend the last year’s model over this one if you want to spend on a better performing cheap smartphone.
If you jump a bit with around 2500 rupees, you can get the new Samsung Galaxy J4 which keeps the same cores with same GPU as last year’s Huawei Y5. With a little up price, you also get an AMOLED display. I haven’t used it so I can’t recommend it either. So you are the one to decide.
