Way lower price, same great

FOR A smartphone priced under Bt9,000, the GR5 2017 from Huawei boasts a quite fetching design and nearly the same good-quality double-lens camera found on the brand’s much more expensive P9 and Mate 9 phones.
Huawei appears to be making brilliant use here of the technological tips picked up from its partnership with Leica on those two phones, but there’s no Leica lens on the GR5 2017 camera and no Leica logo. What this one has in common with its costlier cousins is a pair of sensors with 12-megapixel and 2MP resolution, and the results are nearly as outstanding.
With a dual-lens setup, the main camera’s software simulates a wide lens aperture of up to f/0.95, and with this you can get the popular “bokeh” effect mimicking a professionally blurred background. It really makes the central subject pop, especially in portraits, as I determined while testing the phone.

Having two lenses working together also means you can adjust the focus on the image after you’ve taken the shot.
What’s more, that decent-sized sensor at 1.25 micro-pixels renders beautiful night imagery, pictures that look crisp and vibrant despite the low light. And the PDAF focus clicks in at three-tenths of a second, fast enough for nice action shots.
Up front is a good-quality eight-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens, automatic facial recognition and retouching software, meaning it’s made for selfies.
The GR5 2017 performs quite well overall even if it’s nowhere near as fast as the P9 or Mate 9. You have the Android 6.0 operating system with an EMUI 4.1 user-interface and Huawei’s own Kirin 655 octa-core processor with four cores running at 1GHz and another four at 1.7GHz. There are 3GB of working memory (RAM) and 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded with a microSD card.
The phone has two nano-SIM slots, though one is only for 2G connections and is the same spot you put the microSD card, meaning you have to choose one or the other.

The GR5 2017 isn’t slow by any means. The menus and touchscreen are quite responsive and applications run smoothly. I was able to play High-Resolution Audio files in FLAC 24bit/192kHz format without a hitch, and all types of High-Res Audio files sounded great through Sony’s MDR-1ABT High-Res headphones.
LTE 4G connections were very speedy on TrueMove H’s LTE network, as were app downloads and back-ups to the Google Photos cloud. The Ookla Speedtest app measured downloads at 58.9Mbps and uploads at 29.4Mbps.
The phone has an attractive metal body that’s lightweight and just 8.2mm thick and yet looks even slimmer than that because of the upward-curving top edges. The 5.5-inch Full HD display is a beauty for viewing photos and video.
The fingerprint sensor under the lens is prompt and effective in unlocking the phone.
Add to all this a pretty fat 3,340mAh battery, and you do very nicely indeed in purchasing the GR5 2017 for the suggested retail price of Bt8,990.

Key Specs
- Networks: (4G) FDD/TDD, (3G) UMTS, (2G) GSM
- Operating system: Android 6.0 with EMUI 4.1
- CPU: Kirin 655 Octa-Core (4x2.1GHz plus 4x1.7GHz)
- Memory: 3GB
- Storage: 32GB expandable
- Cameras: Main 12MP +2MP, secondary 8MP
- Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1
- Sensors: Hall effect, fingerprint, proximity, ambient light, compass, acceleration, phone status indicator
- Battery: 3,340mAh
- Dimensions: 150.9x76.2x8.2mm
- Weight: 162g