Introduction and design
The smartphone boom has been the cause of many success stories across the world. In the USA, China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere the thirst for phones has led to exponential growth for keen manufacturers.
In Europe though, oddly, the picture is somewhat different. With the closure of Nokia's devices division in 2014, the largest handset manufacturer on the continent was laid to rest. And with seemingly no domestic offering to take its place, competitors from outside have moved in.
Some small manufacturers have sprung up, and are beginning to make meaningful strides towards success however. Kazam and Wileyfox in the UK are two such examples, while BQ has been gaining particular traction in Spain, expanding significantly.
This firm has now landed on UK shores, a modern and markedly more low-key Spanish conquest, with a suite of budget to mid-range devices aimed at a variety of different tastes and budgets. Of these, the Aquaris M5 is the flagship, but with a starting price of £210 and against the likes of the Moto G4, OnePlus X and others can it really compete?
Design
Modern smartphone design has clearly started to lean towards certain trends. Straight edges and hard lines, clean examples of industrial design, have given way to curves and bends. Plastics have become metals, even at ever lower price points, and the public has become used to a certain shape.
With this in mind, the Aquaris M5 is positively retro. Long straight lines abound, and the design is very much industrial. The device is also coated in a pleasant matte soft touch plastic, which is very comfortable to hold.
At 8.4mm thick, and weighing in at 144g, the Aquaris M5 is neither the most svelte or the lightest handset out there, but it is acceptable nonetheless. The trade-off in weight and dimensions has been for a little extra battery, which is almost always a welcome compromise.
The top of the device houses the 3.5mm headphone jack while on the right side you'll find – in descending order - the microSD tray, the volume rocker and the power key.
As for the left side, it is flush, sporting two microSIM trays and at the bottom you'll find the micro USB port and downward-firing speakers.
On the rear there's a subtle silver BQ logo, along with a square cut out for the 13MP rear camera and a dual-LED flash.
Lastly, the front is home to the 5-inch Full HD display, a 5MP wide-angle front-facing selfie camera, a single LED flash, the call speaker, an ambient brightness sensor, three capacitive buttons (the usual triangle, circle and square) and the call microphone
Especially in white, this is a phone that looks the part, being elegant, minimal and clean. It brings to mind the kind of plastic construction that defined the Lumia range, feeling sturdy as well as premium, especially for the £210 price tag (which can already be dropped to roughly £150 if you shop around). BQ is clearly on to something here.
Key features
The screen is an area where BQ Aquaris M5 excels. At 440ppi it is sufficiently pixel-dense to please all but the most anal of pixel-peepers. Watching videos, reading on the go, viewing images and the rest are all a highly enjoyable experience.
The world may be shifting towards 4K and virtual reality, but for the average person the full HD resolution is a ceiling that never needs to be broken.
This focus on the little things and user experience have led to a few other nice touches, such as the ability of the screen to get super-sensitive to touch, working even with gloves. Or take the ability to get extra bright in direct sunlight, this phone can work well in most conditions.
One slight concern might be the colour reproduction. BQ has tried to circumvent the traditional weakness of LCD screens (undercooked colours), with its 'Quantum Colour +' technology, which boosts saturation. Though the standard screen temperature can be changed, I found it a little red for my tastes, with whites becoming quite pinkish.
Regardless, as one might expect from an IPS panel, viewing angles are solid.
Another slight detraction from the experience is the layer of Dragontrail glass used for screen protection. This competitor to Gorilla Glass has been used by many Japanese companies, but here it just screams of compromise, lacking the signature 'oleophobic' coating of Gorilla Glass clad phones that makes them so pleasant to use.
The average user will likely not notice, but the difference can initially be a little jarring.
Mellow Marshmallow
As well as taking an active hand in designing distinctive hardware, BQ has made a name for itself through strong customer service. What this means for the end user is a commitment to delivering the latest updates to all of its handsets, an admirable commitment. The company keeps regular updates on its progress on an official blog.
Out of the box, the Aquaris M5 comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop pre-installed, however during the setup of the device the user is prompted to upgrade to Android Marshmallow, and the difference is immediate.
More user friendly, battery friendly and less performance intensive than Lollipop, Marshmallow is Android as it should have been at the beginning.
Paired with the Snapdragon 615 running internally, along with 2GB of RAM, going through the OS is a very fluid experience, as is opening and closing apps. Indeed, only the most intensive games will prove to be much of an obstacle for the device in this regard.
BQ offers a few apps of its own of course. A bare-bones Gallery app holds all of your photos, while the (improved) camera app offers an iOS-like shooting experience. BQ Plus is a portal to purchase (seemingly quite comprehensive) device insurance, and is the last of the pre-installed apps.
Dolby Digital delight
When it comes to audio, many manufacturers cheap out. Tinny, weedy little drivers are paired with poor software, delivering an underwhelming experience that generally screams of compromise.
Typically, it is now the preferred tactic of canny manufacturers to promote the audio capabilities of their handsets through software partnerships with known audio brands. The likes of Harman Kardon and JBL in particular have been used on many occasions.
Here it is cinematic audio firm Dolby that has been shoehorned in, providing its "Atmos" technology. When activated, this gives an audible boost to the volume, and a greater richness to the tone across all levels, treble to bass.
It also goes some way to provide something of a soundscape, although it is more successful when linked to a good set of headphones.
The speakers themselves are actually rather decent, turning out a clean, balanced sound that can easily fill a room. They handily beat a noisy shower, and as such should be perfectly adequate for partying down to banging jams in a nice domestic setting.
Serious camera chops
The wider understanding of camera jargon among the public is generally quite poor. For years, marketing teams have been able to keenly exploit this, all in an effort to sell as many phones as possible.
Initially, it was having a flash that set phones apart, then having a front-facing camera. Then the megapixel war began (won resoundingly by Nokia with the 41MP Lumia 1020), and ended. Now, it is the battle of the apertures.
For those who do not know, the aperture is essentially the opening that lets light into the camera. The smaller the opening, the more focused the light, and vice versa. Traditionally, unintuitively, a smaller 'f' number means a bigger aperture, and the bigger the aperture, the better.
The Samsung Galaxy S7 comes with an aperture of f1.7, and the LG G5 is close behind with f1.8, allowing both of these phones to capture a relatively high amount of background blur ('bokeh') for such small camera sensors.
In this respect, the Aquaris M5 is fairly well equipped, with both sensors sporting a relatively wide aperture of f2.0. This means more light in darker situations, and likely a better general performance all around.
The M5 also benefits from an embarrassment of flashes, one on the front and a dual effort on the back, all helping even further to make the most of low-light situations.
Performance and battery life
I tested the 16GB version of the M5, running a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor with 2GB of RAM, and overall I was very impressed.
Running a pretty much stock version of Android, and aided by the performance enhancements brought by Marshmallow, this phone flies through the operating system without a fuss. Apps open and close quickly, and multi-tasking is a breeze.
This extends to gaming too. Predictably, titles like Crossy Road, Magazine Mogul and the like ran flawlessly, while more demanding games like Dead Trigger 2 and Asphalt 8 ran well on lower graphics settings.
As for benchmarks, the Aquaris M5 managed a single core score of 654 on Geekbench 3, achieving a score similar to the Samsung Galaxy S4. The multi-core score is slightly more promising, coming to 2492, which comfortably tops the S4.
It is always worth bearing in mind with benchmark tests that they only tell half the story. Though the best performing phones will indeed come out on top, even lower scoring phones will often still provide an excellent overall experience, that is to say being perfectly acceptable in day-to-day use for 99% of people, and the Aquaris M5 definitely falls into this bracket.
I did experience slightly more bugs and app crashes than I'd have expected, but hopefully this will be sorted out with a software update.
Several storage options are available for the BQ Aquaris M5, from 16GB to 32GB, with the higher priced versions coming with extra RAM to boot, a whole 1GB. With a microSD card, this internal memory can be boosted considerably, as the M5 supports adoptable storage, allowing apps to be installed to the microSD card.
Battery life
As for battery life, with a 3120mAh cell tucked away inside its mostly petite frame, the Aquaris M5 has enough stamina to make it through a full day, perhaps even more for light users.
Starting the day at 7am, browsing Twitter briefly, listening to music through a 40-minute commute, browsing articles during lunch and listening to music over Bluetooth throughout the evening, along with some light gaming and sending and receiving messages throughout the day, plus around half an hour of calls, I found that the Aquaris M5 could make it to midnight with roughly 30% to spare, which is a very respectable result.
Running the techradar battery test (playing a Full HD video at full brightness, with Wi-Fi on and all accounts syncing in the background), the battery dropped 22%, from 100% to 78%, which is quite a respectable score. Though not an amazing one, with the Moto G4 for example dropping just 17% in the same test.
As a bonus, standby times are pretty decent too, a result of the Doze feature present in Android Marshmallow. In all, though it doesn't reach the same heights as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, it is nonetheless a strong performer.
Camera
As was hinted at earlier, BQ has clearly invested a bit in the camera of the M5. It comes with an army of LEDs, a decent megapixel count and a wide aperture, facts that also apply to the front-facing effort. The real question is, do these specifications translate into real-life performance?
The answer? Somewhat. With a 13MP 1/3.06 sensor, the M5 was never going to win any awards for image quality, but surprisingly, the images produced are really quite decent, at least in good light.
In the sun, the BQ manages nice punchy colours, decent detail and no evidence of over-sharpening. This situation quickly degrades in low-light, helped in no small part by the lack of OIS and the sluggish autofocus, but still, it is far from the worst phone I have tested for this.
As for the 5MP selfie camera, it is decent for a budget effort, but auto-portrait lovers will likely be far better served by the likes of the selfie-obsessed OPPO F1 Plus.
When compared to previous iterations, the camera app produced by BQ has improved considerably. Although the layout is still relatively unintuitive, it is far quicker to operate than it has been on previous devices. The HDR mode too produces a nice effect, serving as something more than a 'shadow-brightening' mode.
As for video, well the less said the better, as the results are full of artefacts and digital noise.
In all, this is a dependable workhorse for the average person, not a tool for the pros. In most situations, the M5 will produce something shareable, in others it will cough up something you can be proud of, and really that's something of a compliment to its overall competence.
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Verdict
It has a strong feature set and an attractive price point, but with almost no name recognition in the UK, can the BQ Aquaris M5 really hope to make any headway against the better funded competition?
We liked
This is a phone that feels good from the moment it is picked up. The soft-touch plastic and clean design set it apart from the rest of the budget blowers kicking around, and one-handed use is perfectly achievable.
With a Full HD resolution, the screen on the M5 is pin sharp, with nice colours, strong viewing angles and acceptable sunlight legibility.
Sporting a large battery for the size, and with a power sipping processor and the efficient Android Marshmallow, the battery life on display is really rather decent.
We disliked
Although the camera sensor promises greatness on paper, in reality it is only decent, with other devices such as the Moto G4 performing better at a similar price point.
While the update to Marshmallow brings many welcome improvements, the build I used needed a little more testing, as I came across more bugs and crashing apps than I was otherwise used to.
Though it is possible to get a good deal on the price of this device, it is too expensive directly from BQ and requires a little shopping around.
Verdict
BQ has seen rapid growth in its homeland, and now has grander ambitions across the rest of Europe.
The Aquaris M5 is the spearhead of a new mid-range crusade, and it has a lot going for it. With a big battery, Android Marshmallow, a good processor, a healthy serving of RAM and a lovely screen, it compares well to most of the competition.
Yet with a camera that is mostly average and some bugs and other issues on the software side, it needs a little more polish. Moreover, if BQ wants to make any real headway in the UK, it will need to adjust its pricing. The Aquaris M5 can be had for as little as £150, but it takes some effort to find it at this price.
Despite these drawbacks, this is an excellent budget handset, and recommendable to almost everyone. Devices like this are proof that the 'flagship' class of smartphone is no longer necessary for the common man.
First reviewed: July 2016
July 28, 2016 at 10:01PM
Sean Cameron
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