Huawei Ascend G300 budget Android As an example of how much the budget smartphone has come on over the last 12 months you need look no further than Huawei's G300, which at £100 pre-paid is Vodafone’s latest entry-level Android smartphone. Huawei Ascend G300 Android smartphone Cost conscious: Huawei's Ascend G300 What do you get for your 100 spondulicks? A …
...by hopping over to Very.co.uk (via quidco obviously!), then if you don't mind waiting a couple of weeks (went out of stock after knowledge of the deal went wider) it can be yours for a nats under £73 fine english pounds.
Quidco for 6% cashback for a new account (2% for existing), then you'll need a code for the £30 account credit, which you can get by checking various voucher sites.
The quidco is in addition to, not included in the £73 price, so that's extra bunce if you use it.
I'm not doing all the legwork for you!!
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it runs BBC iPlayer!! Yay!
this is the market functioning as it's supposed to, i.e. a company deploying cut-throat price competition. I think.
Of course it could just be a branding thing - if Huawei get enough PR and market share off this, then they may decide that continued competition reduces the optimal overal profit - that it pays them more to sell fewer units at a higher price.
We in the UK suffer from limited competition a great deal. Maybe I'm just seizing on the G300 as a symbolic respite in the smartphone market. But if the parts get cheaper and cheaper, well, maybe someone else will try to undercut them - but they might just take as long as they possibly can to do so.
I'm still on my Nokia N81 and finally considering upgrading, but I want to stay on O2. I imagine the £100 price on this means it's locked to Vodafone?
I've been looking at the Lumia 710 and I would be interested to know how the two stack up. Note I am not after high performance or external storage or the ability to root my phone... I want a solid phone which can also do internet/email on the side.
If you can get it from Carphone Warehouse on Vodafone, they do theirs unlocked. And without Vodafone's 'wonderful' branding and software.
That's how I got my Lumia 710, at £100 but technically Voda pay&go.
WinPho is based round your address book more. Which I think is a lot nicer than the Android ones I tried. That's where Facebook and Twitter stuff turns up (should you wish to turn it on). Plus swipe left on someone's address, and you get a list of all calls, texts, emails (and social networking crap) for them for the last few weeks. You can pin contacts to your home screen. I've found WinPho better at handling lots of contacts, better at searching your contacts, and smoother at dealing with ones synched to different accounts. Oh and most importantly for me, big writing, when trying to call someone when you're out-and-about.
As a phone I think the Lumia is great. I seem to be getting better signal than on my HTC Wildfire, or my previous Samsung dumb phone. I can make calls from my bedroom and a mate's house with dodgy reception without them breaking up, which neither of the other 2 could manage. I think it's a bit less fiddly to use than either the Android or iOS phone functions, but the in call controls are probably a bit worse (2 buttons to get it onto speakerphone for example).
I prefer email on WinPho, but I doubt there's much in it. You can have a unified inbox (which I haven't tried) and I don't think Android can do that. But I'm told it's good. For a bit of browsing IE seems to be pretty good. However, someone above says they can get iPlayer on the Huawei, so it must do Flash. WinPho doesn't.
As a computer, Android wins. I'm pretty unimpressed with the Windows Marketplace. There's lots of apps, but a lot of them are crap, and there are many things you can't do that there are loads of free apps for on Android. The only one I miss is a WiFi network analyser, so I don't mind. But you might. Also Android's widgets are better than WinPho's live tiles. You can change size on some of them, and display more information. Plus Android can have more than one home screen. Mostly I don't miss this, other than having brightness and GPS controls on the home screen. However, WinPho has Nokia Drive, which is way better for navigation than Google maps. And you have free worldwide maps to dowload to the phone (for when there's no signal).
Finally software. Looks like the Lumia might only get one more major update. It's not going to WinPho 8. I guess the Huawei will only get to ICS.
Final, final caveat. No tethering on the Lumia 710 yet. Nokia have apparently released the software update in some markets, but not all, and it's been promised since April. They're not saying why/when. Quick websearch tells me this is now due on the 27th.
I can't work it out. Have I been downvoted by the fandroids, for saying Android is less than perfect? Or is it WinPho fanboys for the same reason (assuming there are any)? Or perhaps Apple's legions, for barely mentioning them?
I didn't think I'd said anything objectionable, and tried hard to be fair. Perhaps I should just put it down to the usual drooling idiots...
"I have a policy of downvoting anyone who whines about being downvoted."
Seems fair enough.
Although from the 2 upvotes for the post above, it seems like off-topic wins.
Weird, given that someone asked for a comparison of this phone and an identically priced WinPho, which I did my best to do. But there's nout as queer as folk...
"comparison of this phone and an identically priced WinPho"
Who right now is most angry, Android or WP fanbois? (After ruling out Xperia Play owners ;)
A fair few of the WP 'usual suspects' were made into liars by the 'no WP8 upgrade' admission, some seem conveniently MIA right now but I wouldn't be surprised if they're still voting.
I suppose some of the Android crew might forget that stock firmware is just where you start, it's very easy to criticise - and a good fallback when suppliers layer on too much, like the 10+ Facebook+Twitter integration apks Sony scatter on devices like manure on fields.
The Android fans seem to be permanently grumpy. Partly because there are more of them, so you'd expect the loony minority to include more people.
I'm not angry, because I bought WinPho for around £100, and knew what I was getting. You'd have to be a bit annoyed if you'd just gone for a Lumia 900 though. I'd be pretty miffed at MS if I were Nokia, but then they've probably known for ages. Dumping users on platforms that are about to expire is nothing new for them anyway...
To be fair to MS, they are providing another major WinPho7 update, so they're not abandoning the old handsets totally. And they've got a pretty decent record on keeping support going for older stuff, so there may still be patches.
This is one of the areas that gets the most name calling. As people feel the need to justify their spending decisions. It's amazingly rubbish that Android 2.3 handsets are still being released, when ICS is now around 9 months old, and you'd hope Google were providing previews to favoured manufacturers. I think that gets the Android fanbois all defensive. And as we know, attack is the best form of defence...
It's a bit worrying that WinPho8 won't run on single core chips. It has to make you wonder if it's got all porky and bloated, because WinPho7 is very fast on mediocre hardware.
"WinPho7 is very fast on mediocre hardware"
Isn't that because WP7 doesn't let the phone or individual apps get too busy?
Typical Android user ladles on sanity challenging numbers of background apps, never, ever closes apps and then cant understand why it might take a little longer to fire up the next app! That's not really possible on WP7, tasks are too restricted.
The real killer though is native code. VM's tend to be scheduler friendly. Native code shouldn't be able to stop preemptive task switching but somehow it always seems to manage it. The big advance dual core brought me on XP was the ability to still control the damn machine when some rogue app (or Win32 itself) grabbed 100% of a core.
WP8 brings more multitasking and native code. Multicore suddenly seems like a good safety net ;)
In fact El Reg previewed it then - more than a couple of months ago:
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/11/hands_on_with_huawei_ascend_g300_android_smartphone/
Once Voda sorted out their broken purchasing system (someone had entered the wrong code so all purchases were being referred to a team of slow humans who were cancelling the orders after three days) then they arrived, and one quick unlock later you don't have to worry about Vodafone any more.
I got one as an interim device when my iPhone4 when kaput. I'm pretty impressed with it!
I unlocked it for £5 and put my T-mob sim in it, no probs there. If you head over to modaco then there's a fairly active forum there and I was able to root the device easily enough and then proceeded to remove the Voda bloatware. I'm using Holo launcher at the moment, but Launcher Pro made the thing really fast - again impressive at this price.
Something I really like is the RGB LED which works excellently with Light Flow from the play store. Ok, it's not as smooth an experience as the iPhone might have been, but I'm really impressed with what you can get for £100. Also, shove on a Nillkin hard case (again from ebay for less than a tenner) and the whole thing feels much more solid.
I wasn't impressed with the battery at all, however give it a week of charge cycles and it improves hugely.
err..the .HTC One V and Lumia 900 got 75% and the Motorola Defy Mini got 70% so you're criticism is that most phones get rated between 60 and 90%?
That seems reasonable to me as only the truly shit will get less and only the truly superb more. The latter doesn't exist and the former wouldn't be worth reviewing!
Bought this phone online for £100, second day it did a hard factory reset. Fourth day it did the same thing. A phone which does a reset back to factory settings is a waste of time. The touch-screen is very inaccurate and also fuzzy compared to the HTC One V. You get what you pay for, and I would pay at least £50 not to have the crappy Vodafone software. Also £50 to have Ice Cream sandwhich, so the Huawei is no bargain against the £200 One V.
Think you were unlucky. I've got one, love it. Especially when people see what it can do (i.e. run any android app that their £500 phone can) and they find out I only paid £100 for it. Torque works perfectly on it which was my main reason for buying it. There was a major firmware update for it, including a fix for the poor speaker and reliability updates. But that won't fix your dodgy screen! On mine, the screen is plenty sharp enough and touch is better than any touchscreen I've used apart from the Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3. You must never have used a Blackberry Storm if you think it's bad..! I think you got a dud I'm afraid.
But yeah the vodafone software is annoying. If I get bored one day I might try and hack it off.
"Out of the box the Ascend G300 looks rather smart, if a little anonymous. In fact I’m struggling to think of anything to say about the shape other than it’s nicely rounded and easy to hold. There’s nothing wrong with the build quality though, which is top notch."
Well, that's got to be an infringement right there, doesn't it?.
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