Huawei had pitched out quite a big stand to show off its range of smartphones, some four of which are worthy of attention in the mid-low range of the market.
While headliners, such as the 6-inch screened Ascend Mate were already unveiled at CES in January ‘ hands on the device seems a bit absurd. The screen is too big to do anything comfortably, and doesn’t appear to be high enough quality. The Ascend D2 is a bit better to use (it still has a 5-inch screen), but adds water and dust resistance ‘ another of the themes prevalent at the show.
What was new and on show was relatively impressive was Huawei’s successor to the Ascend P1, the P2, and its successor to last year’s successful budget smartphones the G300 and G330.
Huawei rather cheekily claims the P2 is the fastest 4G LTE smartphone in the world ‘ by that they mean download times (rather than processor speeds) ‘ it can download data at 150mbps. There aren’t any networks that can pump out 4G at that rate in this country, so the claim is a bit pointless.
Huawei’s spokespeople gave us some hands on time with the device, and it also uses some new video compression codecs (h.265) to speed up video rendering (and transmission), it also has a very quick camera shoot time of 0.2s.
It also has a large 4.7-inch screen at full HD 1920×1080, it has a decent battery size of 2420mAh. Huawei is positioning it at the midrange market, with a price tag of â¬399. No UK price has been set yet, but it should be available some time in April or May.
The G510 could be Huawei’s next ‘bread and butter’ device, as the G3XX series was, one of the best cost-quality smartphones on the market (the G300 sold for just £100). For some strange reason, Huawei didn’t seem to be making a big deal out of it ‘ if it can replicate the success of the G300 (which What Mobile described as ‘the new standard for entry level handsets’ in our 5 Star review), they’ll have a winner.
It has dual SIM capability, twin 1.2GHz processors (Cortex-A9), 512MB of RAM, a tidy enough 4.5-inch screen at 480×854 resolution (216PPI) and will run the latest version of Android, Jellybean. Whether it has the same battery issues as the G330 did is uncertain, but like the P2, it will be available here in April/May ‘ prices weren’t specified, but it will ‘be priced in the same range as the G300/G330’.
In my quick play with the phone it seemed to handle the OS well enough, none of the apps struggled and it sat in the hand fairly well. It actually has a nice old-school iPhone 4-ish feel to the front design (without the Apple industrial design obviously). I would’ve preferred they kept the screen a bit smaller (4.7-inches on a phone with a 1700mAh battery can’t even be a good idea).
