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Review: Huawei Ascend P2

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Huawei is a relatively unknown in the UK market. While they have made the news with the P6, we are yet to play with them. Having said that, I have been quite keen to try them out, so when Three kindly offered to send me the Huawei Ascend P2, I jumped at the chance.

What is it?

At slightly over 8mm, this thin and stylish phone is another addition to the Android range, and before the P6, this was the best offering by Huawei in the UK market. Released back in February this year, this had to compete with the likes of the HTC ONE and the Galaxy S4. While it doesn’t really give them a good fight, for the midrange price, it offers a fairly good offering.

The look and feel

It is light and thin. The screen still packs in 1280 x 720 pixels, at 4.7″ size. This offers a fairly good resolution, pretty much in line with everything that is available these days. It fits in well in the hand, and slides in well in to your pocket.

Emotion UI

Much like all the other operators, Huawei is quite keen on their own UI, which they have called Emotion UI. It is a good experience, and very little has changed from the stock Android experience. However, the changes that they have made definitely add something.

For example, they have introduced (or brought back) the whole idea of profiles, where a simple flick gives you a rotating menu, and you can set your notifications according to whether you are in a meeting, at work, or at home. Outdoors, and it will be louder and brighter. A nice touch, and it probably already exists in the form of apps.

In the notification menu, the toggle switches can be slid left or right to access them all, instead of all of them opening up like stock Android.

Apart from that, they pack in a few widgets.

The biggest difference though, is that you don’t have an APPs menu. Much like the Blackberry 10 OS, all your apps are placed on the Desktop, though you can arrange them in folders for ease of use and access.

Performance

This packs in a 1.5GHz Quad Core processor and 1GB RAM. Being a light UI does have its advantages, and generally the device’s performance is quite good and slick. Playing games also seems to work very well. We have read other reviews where people complained of the phone being a bit slow, but we generally found it to be quite okay.

Camera

This packs in a 13MP camera with a backlit sensor, much like the HTC ONE. This tends to perform well in bad lighting, but very low lighting did give us some noise. While we haven’t included many samples at the moment, our general impression was that the camera performs very well, specially for a device with the price point.

Call quality

As expected from a good device, the call quality is fairly good.

Battery life

This packs in a fairly decent battery life for a smart phone. Intensive use gave us a good day of use, and relaxed use gave us about 2-3 days.

Areas of improvement:

This is a fairly good device. The only area where this could have been better is having an microSD slot. This packs in 16MB, but the ability to expand this would have been quite useful.

Verdict

With the recent announcement of the P6, the Ascend P2 has dropped a fair bit in price. This puts it in a very attractive bracket, where this may not be the best thing on paper you can buy, but definitely one of the good performing phones out there, specially with a simplistic UI.

To find out more about the Huawei Ascend P2, check out their page at the following link:

http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Devices/Huawei/Ascend_P2

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