We go hands on with the 4.7-inch Huawei Ascend P2 at Mobile World Congress 2013
At CES in January, Huawei announced its Ascend D2 phablet and it has followed up this launch with the P2 at Mobile World Congress 2013.
Huawei has marketed the Huawei Ascend P2 as its first serious consumer smartphone, as it moves from low end ODM to high end OEM, launching its devices as Huawei-branded handsets to networks and retailers.
The Huawei P2 fits into the fashion segment of Huawei's new naming strategy, with D reserved for top technology (ike the Ascend D2 announced at CES), Y for affordability and G for value.
The Huawei Ascend P2 itself features a 4.7-inch, 720p screen. It apparently provides better viewing angles and less glare than other devices on the market. With a ppi of 315, on paper it looks good. The reality is that yes, it looks good, but it was pretty hard to see the screen with bright sunlight streaming from above in our outside venue.
It's also highly reflective, so pretty much impossible to see things apart from your own reflection when outside.
At 8.4mm thick, the Huawei Ascend P2 isn't the slimmest device on the market, but feels comfortable in the hand. The shiny back makes it a little tricky to grip and attracts fingerprints as you'd expect from such a high shine.
The edges are a little sharp, but nothing that will slice your hand, just be sure not to grip the bottom too firmly.
Along the bottom of the screen, there are invisible buttons for the home, back and menu keys. We found these to disappear a little too quickly for our liking and not as responsive as they should be.
With a 1.5GHz processor, things should chug along smoothly. In CAT4 benchmarks, it beat the Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5 LTE with a download rate of 150Mbps compared to the latter device's 100Mbps.
Moving around the device quickly, we did find a couple of judders, but this could be down to pre-production software rather than any major bugs.
In terms of interface and UI, the Huawei ascend P2 runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with Huawei's controversial Emotion UI over the top. It's a Marmite kind of UI - you'll either love it or hate it depending on your view of mobile skins in general.
We haven't spent enough time with the Huawei Ascend to test the 2420mAh battery, but we'll of course do so on in our full review when we can use the handset for more than 10 minutes.
We didn't get to use the 13-megapixel camera much through the scrum of the press preview, but images seemed crisp enough to the naked eye - whether this changes once you upload to your computer and get to zoom right in, we won't know until we get a little more hands on time with the device.
The Huawei Ascend P2 LTE will be available in the UK from Q2 at a pretty reasonable price of £350. Network buy-in hasn't yet been announced for the US, but as Orange was a launch partner in Europe, we'd expect to see it coming to EE.
by via Know Your Mobile
Posts
No comments: