The Honor 5C is official – costs RM799 with preorders starting 20 June

Honor’s latest budget phone is now official in Malaysia and will be available for preorders starting on June 20 on Vmall and Lazada. The Honor 5C comes with a 5-inch 1080p display, a fingerprint reader with an encrypted cache and a fast 0.5 second unlock.

The chassis is hewn from brushed aluminium and looks surprisingly classy belying its asking price. A sub RM1K phone these days offers a surprising amount of value and Huawei’s 5C aims to offer quite a bit for what you pay for. Gone are the erstwhile cheapish looking polycarbonate casings for a polished looking metal one that used to adorn the flagship phones of yore as well as a fingerprint reader and, in the case of the 5C, a pretty nippy processor of recent vintage too.

Three colour variants are available for the Honor 5C. The gray variant comes with a black fascia and a darker gray brushed metallic finish. The silver variant is more of a light metallic blue with a white fascia while the gold has a white front fascia and a burnished coppery gold backplate.

Under the hood the phone runs Android Marshmallow 6.0 with EMUI 4.1 overlaid over it on a nippy Kirin 650 octacore 2.0GHz processor that’s built on the newer 16nm chipsets. Paired with this is a Mali-T830 GPU, 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage with about 9GB or so of effective usable space.

The Honor 5C also integrates quite a few interesting additions that were previously prevalent only on flagships such as integrated health tracking that helps track your weight based on an honour system (pun not intended), distance and calories burned.The hybrid SIM card allows you to use either two SIM cards or a single SIM and a microSD card. While two variants exist internationally – one with 3G and the other with 4G LTE, Malaysia fortunately gets the LTE and VoLTE enabled variant only.

The rear comes with a 13-MP camera with an F/20 aperture while the front comes with an 8-MP camera with an F/2.0 aperture. The camera firmware offers a light painting, seen earlier on last year’s flagship gen Huawei phones along with nine different filter modes, a handy ‘Good Food’ mode to take better food shots, a document scanning mode to take snaps of paperwork  and, for sticklers, a pro photo and pro video mode that lets you tweak shutter speed, exposure, ISO and white balance. Keeping the whole thing juiced up is a non-removable 3,000mAh battery that is charged by a micro USB port at the base of the phone.

The Honor 5C will retail for RM799 for the gray and silver variant while the gold variant will retail for a RM50 premium at RM849. To snag your device on Vmall, swing by here. To acquire it on Lazada saunter on over here. Preorders begin in June 20 with deliveries a week later.