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For Rs.12,999, the Honor 5X packs in quite a punch. The handset features a metallic unibody construction, a 13MP rear shooter, a fingerprint scanner, a 5.5-inch Full HD display, and all-day battery life. You really are going to struggle to find a smartphone that is better than the Honor 5X inside Rs.13000, and if you have spent your hard earned money on it, congrats! You sure have taken a very wise decision.

Now, to help you make the most of your purchase, we have some tips and tricks that can greatly enhance the experience of using the Honor 5X. Read below and find out what they are.

Use a Quick Charger

The Honor 5X is powered by an octa-core Snapdragon 616 chipset, which among other things supports Quick Charge 2.0. This will make charging the 3,000mAh battery on the 5X a breeze, but that is not the case since Huawei has included a mere 1A charger with the handset. Due to this, when charged with the stock charger, the Honor 5X can take its own sweet time to go from 0-100{7bda82c1e6998b9ed8f6e0f52f1ca5ed9d6da876adcfbd0d890c6e0d88340190}.However, if you use a Quick Charge 2.0 compatible charger, you can easily top off the handset’s 3,000mAh battery in only around 1.5 hours. And since Quick Charge 2.0 has become a commonplace, prices of QC 2.0 chargers have also fallen to as low as $10 on Amazon.

Remove the stock screen protector

Since the Honor 5X does not come with any kind of Gorilla Glass protection for the display, Huawei has pre-installed a screen protector on the front glass to protect it from scratches and getting cracked easily. The problem, however, is that the plastic film protector is of horrible quality. It gets oily and greasy after a few hours of use, and I will highly recommend you to remove it and replace it with third-party screen protector — preferably tempered.

Switch to normal power saving mode

The Honor 5X comes with three different types of power saving mode: Normal, Smart and Ultra. Ideally, the phone should be using the Normal power saving mode by default, where the network and CPU activity are not restricted. However, to make sure that the 5X delivers outstanding battery life, Huawei ships the phone on Smart power saving mode.

Under this mode, the CPU usage and network activity are regulated by the OS “for balanced performance.” I have, however, noticed that under this mode, the Honor 5X has a tendency to lag, with system animations sometimes becoming very jittery as well. Thus, I will highly recommend all Honor 5X owners to switch their phone to the normal power saving mode, which might have a small impact on the battery life of the handset, but will ensure great performance.

Fingerprint ID

Like other smartphones from China that come with a fingerprint scanner, the sensor on the Honor 5X can also be used for more than just unlocking the device. Among other things, you can use the fingerprint sensor to go a step back, directly jump to the home screen, answer calls, stop the alarm from ringing, take photos and more. You can also swipe on the fingerprint scanner from various directions to expand the notification panel and bring up the Recents App list.

You can play around with these features by going into Settings -> Fingerprint ID. Do note that these features don’t verify your fingerprint first before doing any action that you enable, which means that they can be triggered by anyone using your phone.

Draw a gesture to open apps

While the fingerprint scanner makes the double-tap to wake feature on the Honor 5X somewhat redundant, the handset does come with another extremely useful feature called Draw that allows you to draw a letter on the screen to open a specific app. For example, with the feature enabled, you can draw ‘c’ on the screen of the Honor 5X with the display switched off to open the Camera app. Sadly, the feature only works with four letters” c, e, m, and w.

You can use the ‘Draw’ feature on your Honor 5X by going to Settings -> Motion Control -> Draw.

Move apps to external storage

The Honor 5X comes with 16GB of internal storage, with around 9.8GB of free storage space out of the box. This might not be sufficient for most people, especially if they play heavy games like Asphalt 8, Real Racing 3 and more. Thankfully though, Huawei has included a microSD card slot on the Honor 5X, which means that you can move apps to SD card to free up internal storage.