Honor 50 Lite: Google Play Services are back on Huawei's former stablemate but that's nothing to get excited about Honor, once the value brand of Huawei but sold last year to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology, has released the Honor 50 and 50 Lite smartphones, and we're taking a look at the latter. Before Huawei was ensnarled in global arguments concerning the security of its products, Honor was the company's budget consumer brand …
In my experience, the one huge advantage of Huawei phones - and the reason I've bought them in the past - is now considered so unimportant that reviews don't even mention the subject: its ability to connect to the mobile network.
I used to find that Huawei phones worked in places where other phones couldn't get a signal.
Reviews, such as the one I'm commenting on, don't even mention the ability of a mobile phone to do its primary task.
Insteas we get loads about the user interface, which I almost always replace anyway.
<sarcasm>
Grandpa, in this day and age you use the phone to 'consume content' and be tracked every freaking moment of your life.
If, for some perverse motive, you would like to actually talk to somebody, you would video call him or send voice messages.
</sarcams>
Good of you to mention it. Brings some memories back - from those dark 3G times, when even venerable Nokia E series phones had had difficulties when roaming betwen 2G and 3G regions. No Android-run smartphone could really be relied upon conection wise, the only smartphones that worked reliably (at least with T-Mobile networks) were Iphones. A technical office guy explained to me (then very confidentially, though I believe he no longer works there) that their cellular network was tailored to work perfectly with Iphones, whereas other brands needed to tweak their slabs to work with the network. Skip some ten years, and most T-Mobile networks in Europe are built with Huawei tech (no more Nokia and Ericsson), 3G being switched off in most places, Iphone is to the engineering guys just one brand of many, and voila, one gets better reception and better LTE parameters with good value Huawei phones than with pricey Iphones.
One has to admire these things, by the way. Reliable high throughput wireless links (bluetooth, wifi, 4g, 5g, all of them) are work of alchemy, time and again killing hopes of many a small networking start up. Things like 256qam demodulation, 8 bits per baud, by a 4 sq.mm. chip in a wristwatch, just to get those AR Pokemon game updates while strolling in the park. A miracle.
You'd need to travel to multiple locations with problematic reception on a certain carrier, use a SIM for that carrier, and then collect data (dbm of signal reception, observed bandwidth, error rate, etc.) and "make a call".
Differences in the conditions (weather, improvements or breakage in the cell tower you connect to at that location) or load on the carrier's network on the day you happened to test could render your tests useless unless you also bring along a few "known quantity" phones you've tested previously to act as controls.
It could take all day to do a good job testing this and it still might not be applicable to someone's experience who has different bands available to them (due to differences in the antennas provided for each in the phone) let alone a different country where even more things might be different. To top it off, a brand new model you decide has crap reception could be greatly improved a month or two after release once a firmware update that carries fixes to the baseband is applied...
It is a lot easier to run a bunch of CPU/GPU benchmarks in your basement, take a few photos, and write your review.
"The fingerprint reader is built into a side button which also handles on and off, and both worked for us, though this seems a device for the right-handed."
don't you just register a different finger? I've had side unlock phones before and I register the easiest finger on both hands to use it with, so I can use it with both hands..
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
