Honor 5C: Built like a tank and made to last

This post is brought to you by the honor 5C

The midrange/budget smartphone market is incredibly competitive. Many devices offer great specs for a great price and top it off by adding a nice premium build to their smartphone’s chassis. However, while many can guarantee you good specifications and internals for your money, not many have the guts to claim a durable build.

Honor, though, are pretty confident in the durability of their new midrange smartphone, the honor 5C.

You see, the new honor 5C is built to Huawei’s stringent 3.1 quality assurance standards. Or, in other words, honor has tortured their 5C to ensure that you won’t be tortured when you inevitably bump your smartphone into something a little harder than it. In fact, this new standard is one above the one that they use to test the Huawei P9 and honor 5X, and we already know the honor 5X can take a beating. Here’s how they do it.

First, you have your bog-standard drop test. The smartphone, made from aircraft-grade aluminium, is dropped from a height of 1m and 1.2m to see if it can survive the common drop height (about the average person’s arm level). But that’s not all since this is the more stringent 3.1 standard, honor also drops the phone from a height of 1.5m, which is around the average height of a Malaysian female.

After that, honor tests the 5C’s ability to withstand impact. How? Well, by dropping a steel ball on it, of course. The ball, weighing 130g (that’s the weight of an iPhone 6), is dropped twice from a height of 23cm.

Then the testing moves on to investigate the durability of the smartphone’s ports. The headset and micro USB ports were plugged and unplugged 20,000 times which translates to about 55 years of average usage.

Following that, the smartphone was subjected to the thermal and humidity tests. During these tests, the phone goes through a whole bunch temperature specific tests. First, it’s to an environment with 85°C heat and 85% humidity. Then it’s put through 600 cycles of rapidly changing temperatures from -40°C to 70°C.

Finally, comes the salt spray test that covers the smartphone in a fine mist of 5% sodium chloride solution at 35°C for 24 hours. The salt spray test is designed to test for corrosion and check corrosion resistant materials and surface coatings.

Only after the honor 5C has passed every single one of those tests do they put it on sale for you to buy. But that’s not all, as honor also promises quality after-sales customer support. As a result, the honor 5C comes with a 6-month 1-to-1 exchange policy (subject to T&C), something many flagship smartphones don’t even have. Talk about putting your mind at ease.

Couple all of that with the already great value for money specs — a Full HD display, 16nm Kirin 650 processor and a great 13MP primary camera — and you know that your money is being spent well.