Huawei is China’s biggest technology company and it is known for making smartphones, smart accessories, laptops, TVs, and many other consumer electronics. The Chinese company has launched the Huawei nova 5, a nice mid-range smartphone with some of the best features you can find for its price.
Huawei has been known for making smartphones that offer great value for their price and that didn’t change with the launch of the Huawei nova 5. Despite being a mid-range smartphone, the nova 5 still comes with some of the high-end specs that are only common to flagship smartphones. With all of that, the phone is still relatively affordable compared to other major mid-rangers that come close to it in terms of features.
The Huawei nova 5 comes with a beautiful screen, a premium design, a powerful processor, impressive battery life, and lovely cameras. It is one of the top options for anyone who wants to get a nice mid-range smartphone in the Android market.
In this article, I’ll be sharing with you everything you should know about the newly launched Huawei nova 5, its full specifications, price, and features. I’ll also be doing a quick review which can help you make a purchase decision. Let’s get right into it.
Huawei nova 5 Key Specs
- 6.39 inches OLED display
- HiSilicon Kirin 810 SoC
- 8GB of RAM
- 128GB of internal storage
- 48MP + 16MP + 2MP + 2MP quad rear camera
- 32MP front-facing camera
- 3,500 mAh non-removable battery
- Under display fingerprint sensor
- 4G LTE network support
- Android 9 Pie with EMUI 9.1
- 40W Huawei SuperCharge
Design and Body
Looking at the Huawei nova 5, you will notice it is well designed but it is not unique as there are many smartphones out there that look like that. This isn’t a major problem as Huawei makes up for that by giving the phone a premium build quality and also making it have one of the best internal specs for a mid-ranger.
The phone comes in a glass sandwich built with glass on the front and back coupled with an aluminum frame to hold them together. The glass and aluminum body feels premium and sleek as it has a thickness of 7.3 mm and weighs about 171 grams. Unfortunately, it is an unbranded glass used so we don’t know the extent of protection it can offer.
The glass rear helps to house the quad-camera setup and Huawei’s branding. On the sides, you’d find the usual power button and volume rockers.
As for color, Huawei doesn’t offer you many options as the phone is available only in Black, Purple, and Green.
Display
Coming to the display, the Huawei nova 5 sports a 6.39 inches display with an OLED panel. The display has an FHD resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels and 403 PPI density. It has a tiny waterdrop notch at the top center which houses the selfie camera. The phone is close to being bezel-less with the bezels only being noticable at the top and bottom.
Being able to have an OLED panel is quite impressive as it makes you experience high contrast and deep blacks when viewing content. Not only that, but the OLED panel also makes it possible for the phone to wield an optical under-display fingerprint sensor for biometric authentication.
Processor and Memory
Surprisingly, the Huawei nova 5 is the first phone to feature the new Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 810 chipset. The HiSilicon Kirin 810 chipset is built on a 7nm fabrication process which is power efficient as it reduces heat. The chipset has two Cortex-A76 main cores running at 2.27GHz and six Cortex-A55 efficiency cores clocked at 1.88GHz coupled with the Mali-G52 MP6 GPU.
The processor is paired with a massive 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage with a Nano Memory card slot available. The large memory and storage size is a very good thing as more and more apps are becoming RAM and storage hungry.
Camera
Over the past few years, smartphone cameras have evolved and become way better. Huawei has been at the forefront of this break as it has launched phones that have one of the best cameras on the market.
This is seen in its mid-range smartphone as the Huawei nova 5 offers one of the best camera hardware for a mid-ranger. It has a quad rear camera setup and a single front-facing camera.
The quad rear camera features a 48MP main camera with f/1.8 aperture, a 16MP ultrawide camera with f/2.2 aperture, a 2MP macro camera with f/2.4 aperture, and a 2MP depth camera.
The main camera is used for normal wide shots while the ultrawide camera is used to get a wider view and the macro camera is used to take close-up shots. The depth camera is close to useless as it is said to only help with bokeh in portrait mode.
The selfie camera features a 32MP sensor with an f/2.0 aperture and a 26 mm lens. The selfie camera takes nice photos and it is quite wide so you can fit two or more people into one shot.
As for video recording, both the selfie and rear camera are capped out at 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second.
Battery and Charging
On the inside, the Huawei nova 5 is backed by a 3,500 mAh non-removable Li-Po battery. The battery capacity is not large but working with a power-efficient processor and display, the battery life is going to be good enough for an average user.
As for charging, there’s support for Huawei’s 40W SuperCharge which the company claims can take the phone from 0% to 85% in only 30 minutes of charging. Fast charging of this power can easily make up for the battery capacity.
Network and Connectivity
There’s support for 4G LTE network on the Huawei nova 5 and it supports the following LTE bands: 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 19, 34, 38, 39, 40, & 41.
As for connectivity, the phone comes with dual-band Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi Direct, GPS, and Bluetooth 5.0. There is a USB Type-C port with OTG support for charging and data transfer. Unfortunately, there is no 3.5mm headphone jack so you get a dongle, use wireless headphones or get a USB-C headphone.
Software
On the software side, the Huawei Nova 5 runs on Android 9 Pie with EMUI 9.1 skin on top.
Huawei nova 5 Price and Availability
The Huawei nova 5 is priced at around $360 which is equivalent to about €350. You can get it at Huawei’s official stores as well as other partner retail stores.
Huawei nova 5 Review
After going through the Huawei nova 5 specs and features, one thing I can say for sure is that it is a great mid-range smartphone for anyone that wants to get it. It offers great value and doesn’t disappoint in the aspects that are most needed.
