Huawei U8800 IDEOS X5 Pro hands on and Review

Huawei Huawei U8800 X5 Pro is a upgraded or a new version of the already existing model IDEOS X5 in the market by Huawei. The major upgrades that come with this new U8800 IDEOS X5 model include upgraded Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) instead of v2.2 (Froyo), better 1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor instead of 800 MHz.

It comes with Android Gingerbread V2.3 as its operating system, 3.8′, WVGA  capacitive multi touch display powered by 1GHz processor, 512 MB RAM with 720p HD Video recording, playback support and Internal phone storage of 1.5 GB. It’s 5MP Camera comes with Flash which is rare, if you checkout Android mobile devices in same price range. It also comes with SRS WOW HD Audio Effect and a 1500mAh Li-Ion Battery.

3.8″ TFT LCD Display

It comes with a big 3.8″ TFT LCD display with a resolution of WVGA, 480 x 800 Pixels and support for 16 M colors.  The big display makes it very easy to use the phone for everything that you wanted to do on your phone including playing Games, browsing the web, typing long texts and even watching videos.

HD Recording and Playback

If you love to download and watch videos which are in different formats, then you can play all of them easily as it supports 720p recording, playback along with support for video formats like H.263/H.264/ MPEG4 WMV 9 RMVB etc. Hence you need not convert your videos to compatible formats before transferring them on your Phone.

5 MP camera with Auto Focus & Flash

IDEOS X5 Pro comes with 5 MP camera with Auto Focus & Flash. Flash is not enabled by default in camera options, but you can enable it easily by changing the Camera settings. Having Flash helps you click Pictures when the lights are not enough which is often the case. Auto focus feature also helps in clicking better pictures without blur.

The pictures taken by the Camera were good but don’t expect the flash to be as good as normal Camera flash.

Though I don’t like the Camera being a bit protruded out from the Back cover as its not fully embedded with Back Cover. But that’s not a big issue though for many of us.

Battery Life

It comes with a 1500mAh Li-Ion Battery. Battery life of this device did amazed me a bit. Even with heavy use of 3G all day, apps like twitter, push mails, YouTube videos, few Phone calls and few games the battery lasted for more than a day. It lasted even almost two days when phone was used moderately (no videos and games were played) and not with so heavy use.

One of the reasons for a better battery life may be the integrated Battery saving App from Huawei which manages different aspects of phone to save the battery.

HUAWEI Own Features and Apps

Apart from these, IDEOS X5 comes with some HUAWEI own features and apps like Task Manager, All Backup, Huawei Cloud+, Huawei Streams, Message+ and even own Appstore. Cloud Drive service offers 16GB free Cloud storage and Message+ is a app similar to Apple’s iMessage to share text, pictures, music and videos with friends. But these services are limited only to Huawei Devices e.g. you cant use Message+ to send messages to your friends who are not having a Huawei Device.

It also comes with a App which integrates your phonebook with facebook, Twitter & Linkedin accounts. It also includes a Phone finder App to locate your phone, lock, backup and erase data in case it gets stolen.

Conclusion

Its Benchmark scores were good and comparable to devices in this range, but Neocore benchmark Score of 29.1 FPS is still puzzling me. I am still to get a suitable explanation from Huawei about this low score (I did sent them a email, but still awaiting the reply).

Update on Neocore Scores: After doing a lot of search on web, we found that Neocore only really works well with MSM GPUs, not Snapdragons which is the case here. Perhaps that is the reason for low score. I would still wait for a official answer.

If you are looking for a Phone in Rs. 10,000- 15,000 then you can consider this phone as it comes with some good features and specifications. Only thing that I am not sure is, about the After sales service.

Buy Online

If you want to buy it, then you can buy it online from the stores like FlipKart or Tradus.in. In both stores, it is priced at Rs. 13,800.

If you need a discount, just use the Code AVINASH on tradus and you will be getting flat discount of Rs. 500.

Specifications