Huawei Ascend P6: Skinny smartphone that's not just bare bones Just who the heck does Huawei think it is? Surely it is the purveyor of budget Android tat and carrier-branded dreck? I’m loathe to use the word "landfill" because some of its newer cheap handsets, like the 4.5-inch Ascend GS510, aren’t actually that bad and I’d certainly take one in preference to an appless, gutless, webcam- …
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Kia and Hyundai make pretty reasonable cars and offer them with huge mileage warranties but still people opt for better know brands eventhough the product is not as good.
This is a good start for the phone maker and I am sure it will get better, but it's not quite the bragging brand people need.
My direct experience with Samsung engineers (i.e. working with them at SS) makes me think they are all much of a muchness.....it's all timescales, and no time to do a good job.
As always, there are good and bad engineers. But even a good engineer wilts under ridiculous timescales.
"Cut the cheese"? I've been using one of Huawei's earlier offerings, the Ascend G330, for a while now and though I can't really say that it's fantastic, neither would I ever say that it has ever farted! I hope that this isn't going to be a new Android feature...
To be honest, though, I get nervous of any phone that stops you from replacing certain vital components such as the battery. That said, it looks promising, though I prefer a phone that sits well in your hand, so the slimness is only going to be any good if it allows for this.
If you're really looking for a stonkingly good deal and don't feel brandwashed (I've coined that) try one of the Generic Android phones available from China. Anything based on the MTK6589 or MTK6589T is pretty decent and available SIM-Free for less than £200 delivered. Some smaller phones are available at around the £100 mark. Most are available with Dual-SIM as well, very handy for those with Mistresses. Rooting is trivial on all of them. The only problem I've had is some Chinese Crapware which might scare off the Tin Foil Hatteries, a simple remove sorted that out.
The usual caveats apply when buying direct from China, but I've had reasonable success.
I took a chance and splashed out on a MTK6589 based phone via a supplier on Aliexpress with some history and OK feedback. It was pretty good for the £200 delivered but it died after 3 months and of course came without any enforceable guarantee. It died after 4 hours of using it in my air conditioned car as a gps and Bluetooth media server at the same time. It wasn't noticeably warm when it keeled over. So if you buy one check out the warranty support first. Also they didn't include a compass in the standard design which was a loss for me. I'm now back on my Galaxy S which although old and slow and can lock up if it gets too warm, still works well once allowed to cool down a bit!
I agree. I've a Star 6 inch phone with a 13mp camera and it cost less than $200 delivered. It too comes with some free chinese porno sites crapware, which I ignore, I have found mine to be reliable so far(4 months), no crashes. The replaceable battery is 3500mAHr and can be charged with a Samsung mains operated dedicated £4 battery charger. The only problems are a lousy (by my standards) email program and the camera app doesn't allow you to directly email a picture after taking it. The wifi analyser app works brilliantly and helps to solve my contention problems.
It is far better on wifi than her mini ipad which also regularly loses emails.
I remember a commenter on here a while back that made a fantastic note to congratulate LG on creating a phone made of a material capable of slipping on any surface. It still amazes me quite how able it is to slide on any surface you can throw it at (sic).
I've long wondered what on earth people need so much storage for on a phone? Surely just music?? Ten thousand albums downloaded from Pirate Bay? Every picture ever taken?? Movies??
My two year old Nexus S still has 10 gigs free of 14, and I don't worry about managing what's on it. I'll copy off the photos every couple of weeks, but that's it.
Truth is that probably two thirds of people exist quite happily with 8 or 16 gigs on a phone.
@ Barry Rueger "I've long wondered what on earth people need so much storage for on a phone? Surely just music??"
My hobby is dancing and I attend lots of classes and workshops. At these events the teachers will often recap their class and so I often shoot lots of 1080p video with my phone (an S3) and the 64GB microSD is extremely handy for this. When I have a spare moment and nothing better to do (like on a plane flight), I've often done a bit of dancer's "homework" by reviewing the videos I've taken and they're an excellent aide memoire.
I couldn't cope with a phone that has only 16GB of storage. My phone is a data storage device, video camera and music storing device (I've even DJ'd using it).
Flash RAM storage is relatively cheap, so why can't they just bung some more in? I guess it's a cost saving exercise...
If their support for the P6 is any similar to the support they gave to their earlier flagship phone, the "Honor 2" aka "G615", don't expect too much in terms of OS updates. The Honor 2 shipped in March with near stock ICS and a promised update to 4.1 - for March. The update came 3 months late, that would have still been fine, if not for the fact that it was so buggy, it was virtually unusable.
Best was how this was fixed - they just offered a downgrade to ICS.
Of course installing the update completely wipes the phone, as does the downgrade. All in all a big loss of time for no good reason.
As for their "emotion UI" - at least the one they included in their ill fated Jelly Bean update for the Honor 2, they did not bundle any crapware with it. (If you don't count their UI as crapware, of course).
Pity Huawei didn't learn from the mistakes of their competitors.
Hah hah hah. I picked up a lumia 925 for 240 quid last week, off contract. Why on gods earth would i want to pay 340 for a tatty phone running a virus fest of an operating system that reports every detail of my private life back to creepy google plus probably the creepy Chinese government too? If you have any sense of personal dignity (or infact, any sense at all) you will not buy this product.
As opposed to Microsoft, who were one of the first tech companies to sign up to the NSA and have backdoored Skype, Skydrive etc. Have you even read the recent article about Win 8 and TPM ? At least Android can be rooted, unwanted apps removed and pretty much everything controlled by firewalls and the likes of XPrivacy and LBE Security.
"At least Android can be rooted, unwanted apps removed and pretty much everything controlled by firewalls and the likes of XPrivacy and LBE Security."
While you are right to worry about your phone, your cellco will be more than happy to pass on what you're up to. Using Android is not the same as living off grid.
>"creepy google plus probably the creepy Chinese government"
Gosh, what a lot of creepy. Creepier than RICHTO (Vogon) posting creepy M$ creepy propaganda from behind the creepy mask of cowardice? Methinks not.
>"If you have any sense of personal dignity..."
Was that another sarcastic M$ in-joke? Like "trusted computing" and "windows defender" and "secure boot" and so on...
I agree, at that price point I would describe it as upper mid-range at least. One can after all get a GS4 for about £450 and that is about the highest end conventional* Android phone currently available. A phone that costs a touch over three quarters of the latest Galaxy S is scarcely cheap. I would however slightly rephrase your comment by saying that as far as I am concerned, at that price "it better be good"!
*To distinguish the slot the GS4 occupies from the current crop of FEMPs. (Fucking Enormous Mobile Phones).
Quite - and the Lumia 520 the article compares it to as being better is £80 on PAYG, hardly comparable to a £340 phone! There are far cheaper Android phones also, I wouldn't put this one in that category.
For other comparisons made, I'm not sure I'd miss a webcam in an £80 phone. I've not used a phone for video calling since they started appearing in even feature phones 8 or more years ago. I'm not sure many people use this, outside of Apple-product-placement-ads in TV trying to make it appear that people actually use it...
Then the article jumps to listing the iphone 5 as one of the top line of phones, without mention of it being a "small-screen" iphone 5... (not to mention the still on sale iphone 4S and 4 - at much higher prices than a Lumia 520 - are even smaller displays).
I bought a Lumia 820 recently - it's undoubtedly the best phone I've ever had.
I even like Windows Phone - it remembers that the device is primarily a phone. Tiles look more modern than the icons on other platforms, in my opinion, and seem better suited to touch operation.
For the price of the phone in the review, a valid comparison is much higher up the model range than the 520.
Tiles look more modern than the icons on other platforms, in my opinion, and seem better suited to touch operation.
I d'no, I already have Launcher 7 Donate edition for Android, and I found myself going back to Nova or the default launcher. "Modern" is in the eye of the beholder, and flat squares remind me more of the 1980s than the 2010s.
What would be nice is if Microsoft remembered that a desktop computer isn't a phone.
Personally I rate the construction of the Q10 over the iPhone.
I think the 5MPx front camera may reflect the passion of Chinese tourists for photographing themselves in front of foreign artefacts, to prove they were there, rather than any desire to relay genital shots with high resolution. At least, I hope so.
I've got a Huawei Honor 2 (U9508) which has exactly the same chipset (and screen).
I'm running Emotion UI on Android 4.1.2, but I get 1,436ms in Sunspider. Seems they've gone backwards with the software then.
All told though, the U9508 is an utterly excellent phone for the dollars, and I really can't understand people's reluctance to buy Huawei. They're all made by Foxconn, morons.
I bought a G510 for the wife and the launcher is execrable. The desktop and the apps list is one and the same. It means if you install a new app, its icon is plonked god knows where, and no sort order is maintained making it impossible to find any apps after a while.
Fortunately android allows the launcher to be replaced to something more resembling the default (Go or Nova Launchers are good replacements) but this crapware (and other stuff like Facebook) is baked in and there is nothing short of rooting that will remove it.
I would dearly love to know why phone makers do this. The default launcher is perfectly functional and easy to use. Why bother writing a new one that is frustrating and removes important functional and spatial utility?
There is nothing wrong with the hardware. Indeed the hardware and the price point is great. But the insanity that is the software would mean I couldn't recommend this brand to anybody.
Both represent fantastic value for money. I often look at those demanding (for their use) massive storage and / or an SD card slot and wonder why they need so much but in the case of the Nexus 4 I would advise strongly going for the 16GB version only. I have the 8GB version and rarely use it for music yet with less than 1GB of music, my normal apps and photos taken I have very little space left.
Advertising it as 8GB would be fine if it came with 8GB usable but it doesn't. You will never have 8GB or even 7.6GB~ once you take into account what the system uses on its own. Realistically you have around 5GB for all your storage needs and even with cloud storage that will go far faster than you may think. Still, at £159 the phone cannot be beaten on value and I thought it was a great deal at £249!
If you stick your hand in your pocket, the wrist will be at the top. So if you pull out a phone, you'll be holding the edge that was top in the pocket near your wrist. In other words, you'll put the phone into your pocket upside down and hence a headphone socket at the bottom is perfectly reasonable. In fact, it always bugs me that my phone's is at the top.
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