Huawei Y5 2019: Features | Pricing | Specs

Where to buy

When you're buying a cheap phone, you accept that you're not getting the cutting edge in phone design and technology. Increasingly, however, we're seeing budget phones that specialise in one particular area in order to stand out, often in cameras or battery capacity.

The Huawei Y5 2019 takes quite a different approach because its unique selling point comes from its design and, specifically, the use of a faux leather finish.

Design

• 5.71-inch LCD display
• 720p display
• Faux leather rear
• No fingerprint sensor

• Read more about the Huawei Y5 2019's design

  The Huawei Y5 2019 certainly doesn't have particularly impressive core specifications for its display. It's a 5.71-inch, 1520 x 720 pixel LCD with a simple teardrop style notch at the top and a prominent lower bezel housing a Huawei logo.

  Flip it over – or pick it up – and you'll come face to face with the Huawei Y5 2019's selling point, which is the use of a faux leather finish. Leather – or, in this case, more cow-friendly faux leather – isn't a common smartphone material, although we have seen it in a few more premium-priced handsets over the years.

  Huawei produces the Huawei Y5 2019 in a variety of faux leather tones, but here in Australia, it's available in Amber Brown only. Huawei says that it's fingerprint and wear resistant as well as being "anti-dirty", although we're yet to put one through its paces to see how durable that faux leather finish really is.

  However, one of the consequences of that design choice is that there's nowhere for Huawei to place a fingerprint sensor for unlocking the phone. It instead offers facial unlocking via the front camera, but that's just simple image identification and nowhere near as secure as biometric authentication.

Camera

• Single front and rear cameras

• Read more about the Huawei Y5 2019's camera

  Huawei is responsible for some of our favourite camera phones of recent years, and even in the budget space, it has innovated with multiple camera arrays and some genuinely impressive AI-driven software to stand out.

  That's not the Huawei Y5 2019's story because in camera terms, it's very basic indeed. At the rear, you'll find a single 13MP f/1.8 sensor, and at the front, you'll find an even more rudimentary 5MP f/2.2 sensor. It's a very bare bones phone camera for 2019, and you shouldn't expect anything but the most basic performance out of it as a result. Even within the Huawei family, you don't have to spend that much more to get a better camera experience.

Performance

• MediaTek MT6761 is a very basic processor
• Only 2GB of RAM
• 32GB of onboard storage
• Runs Android 9, but might not see any more updates

• Read more about the Huawei Y5 2019's performance

  Just as it does with the camera, Huawei keeps it rudimentary when it comes to the Huawei Y5 2019's internal components. It's running on MediaTek's entry level MT6761 processor with just 2GB of RAM, so don't expect anything but basic performance out of this phone. It's certainly outclassed here by a number of phones in this price bracket in specifications terms.

  The 32GB of onboard storage is also small by 2019 standards, especially when you realise that the internal Android operating system, Huawei's own EMUI launcher and preinstalled apps will all eat away at that meagre offering. One nice feature here is that the Huawei Y5 2019 features a triple bay SIM card slot, so you can run 2 4G LTE SIMs and up the internal storage by up to 512GB via microSD if you need to. That's an uncommon feature across any phone, let alone a budget model.

  The Huawei Y5 2019 runs Huawei's EMUI launcher on top of Android 9, which isn't surprising for a budget phone. The odds of seeing an upgrade to Android 10 given the current US ban on Huawei dealing with American companies are rather slim, however.

Battery life

• 3,020mAh battery

• Read more about the Huawei Y5 2019's battery life

  Rounding out the ordinary specifications trifecta for the Huawei Y5 2019 is its internal battery capacity. 3,020mAh isn't, as Huawei would put it, a "large" battery for this kind of phone, and while it's not terribly small either, at the most generous, you might call it "average".

  The internal processor and smaller screen do give it some scope for all-day battery life if you're only a moderate user, but don't expect much more than that.

Early outlook

• Interesting design hides a very average handset

• Read our early Huawei Y5 2019 verdict

  If your budget is constrained and you want a phone that doesn't look the part of a budget phone, the Huawei Y5 2019 might be OK.

  However, that's about as far in recommendations as we can go for this phone because in every other aspect, it's generally average at best and often below that. What you can get for budget money has moved on from the Huawei Y5 2019 in every way except for that faux leather back, so you'd have to like it a lot to make it worthwhile.

Pricing and availability

Pricing and availability

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Specifications

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