In a recent bid to boost its image in the UK, ever-ambitious Chinese telecom brand, Huawei, has released the mid-high-end Ascend P1, a thin Android phone (Ice Cream Sandwich) with a 4.3-inch display and 960 x 540 resolution, a 1.5 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and an 8-Megapixel camera sensor. Is the Ascend P1 a worthy buy? Answers and more in today's smartphone review.
Design & Handling
The ultra-thin (7.7 mm, just less than the Motorola Razr), lightweight Ascend P1 has a sober, minimalist body with soft-touch matte black coating that feels nice in your hand. The non-removable back is fixed to the rest of the body, so like many smartphones today you can't get to the battery. The SIM card goes in the slot at the top of the handset and the microSD card goes in on the side edge.
The Ascend P1 is one of the frontrunners in the Great Race to the Thinnest Phone
The top-notch finishing gives you the sense that you're holding a solid, reliable smartphone.
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Screen
The 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen with 960 x 540 resolution (again, like the Razr) makes for a gorgeous display with 256 dpi pixel density. As always on Super AMOLED screens, the contrast is excellent (it's "infinite", in other words, very very deep) and the brightness level is decent, just about average on today's market. In portrait mode it has good colour accuracy with a Delta E of 4.8 (Delta E measures how true the colours shown onscreen are compared to how they're supposed to appear, where perfectly accurate tones would be under 3). In landscape mode, however, the dE goes wild, jumping all the way up to 13 and making the colours look only a little psychotic. In any case, the screen is always legible outdoors in the sunlight.
The Corning Gorilla Glass is intended to make the screen more damage-resistant and we can confirm that after about ten days of testing, our model didn't have the slightest hint of a scratch on it.
The display is precise and responsive, and coupled with overall speed from the processor, it's a nice phone to navigate through and web browse on.
Interface & Navigation
The Android interface is as easy as cherry pie. Other than a few wallpapers and the slightly modified camera interface, Huawei hasn't added any software overlay the way so many of its competitors do. What you get is pure 'Droid, so ICS users will already know their way around. The only other real modification is the lock screen, which has shortcuts that take you to straight to either the phone, camera or text function. That means you can go directly to the feature you're looking for without having to unlock the phone and find the icon.
The Ascend P1 is responsive, making it noticeably enjoyable to use on a daily basis. Tasks execute quickly, apps open fast and navigating through the menus runs perfectly smoothly.
Left: Settings. Right: Network manager, accessed directly from the homescreen
Multimedia
The 8 Mpx camera sensor is Huawei's attempt to climb up to the high-end and meet the big guys (iPhone 5, Galaxy S3 and the like) on their own turf. But given that pixels aren't everything, how is the overall rendering? Well, it's not that bad, especially in the right lighting. The colours are fairly accurate, but the noise reduction (which isn't 100% effective—you can still see noise in darker colours, especially black) also reduces the sharpness, making for less detail than you get with the iPhone 5 and GS3. But it isn't a train wreck either.
The camera interface includes a few filters and options for you. It focuses and saves photos rather quickly, so you can take several in a row.
The video camera shoots in 1080p with reasonable rendering for this type of smartphone, although we would have preferred a real image stabiliser.
The audio output is a real disappointment, with a low maximum volume and a marked loss of stereo when you turn on Dolby. Dolby mode raises the volume, but in doing so it creates distortion and degrades the overall sound quality.
Internet: pages load quickly, but you have to zoom in to read any small writing. Landscape mode helps.
Battery Life
With the 1670 mAh battery fully charged the Ascend P1 lasts a full day of fairly intensive usage (social networking, texts, music, photos, Internet) with 3G and Wi-Fi turned on. That's just about average for this kind of phone, although the Huawei Honor lasts longer.
Design & Handling
The ultra-thin (7.7 mm, just less than the Motorola Razr), lightweight Ascend P1 has a sober, minimalist body with soft-touch matte black coating that feels nice in your hand. The non-removable back is fixed to the rest of the body, so like many smartphones today you can't get to the battery. The SIM card goes in the slot at the top of the handset and the microSD card goes in on the side edge.
The Ascend P1 is one of the frontrunners in the Great Race to the Thinnest Phone
The top-notch finishing gives you the sense that you're holding a solid, reliable smartphone.
Screen
The 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen with 960 x 540 resolution (again, like the Razr) makes for a gorgeous display with 256 dpi pixel density. As always on Super AMOLED screens, the contrast is excellent (it's "infinite", in other words, very very deep) and the brightness level is decent, just about average on today's market. In portrait mode it has good colour accuracy with a Delta E of 4.8 (Delta E measures how true the colours shown onscreen are compared to how they're supposed to appear, where perfectly accurate tones would be under 3). In landscape mode, however, the dE goes wild, jumping all the way up to 13 and making the colours look only a little psychotic. In any case, the screen is always legible outdoors in the sunlight.
The Corning Gorilla Glass is intended to make the screen more damage-resistant and we can confirm that after about ten days of testing, our model didn't have the slightest hint of a scratch on it.
The display is precise and responsive, and coupled with overall speed from the processor, it's a nice phone to navigate through and web browse on.
Interface & Navigation
The Android interface is as easy as cherry pie. Other than a few wallpapers and the slightly modified camera interface, Huawei hasn't added any software overlay the way so many of its competitors do. What you get is pure 'Droid, so ICS users will already know their way around. The only other real modification is the lock screen, which has shortcuts that take you to straight to either the phone, camera or text function. That means you can go directly to the feature you're looking for without having to unlock the phone and find the icon.
The Ascend P1 is responsive, making it noticeably enjoyable to use on a daily basis. Tasks execute quickly, apps open fast and navigating through the menus runs perfectly smoothly.
Left: Settings. Right: Network manager, accessed directly from the homescreen
When it comes to raw power, with its Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz and 1 GB of RAM, the Ascend P1 got 3/5 on the benchmarks we ran on it. This respectable score got dragged down by the phone's unexceptional GPU. The CPU is perfectly fine, but of course it isn't as fast as the Tegra 3.
Left: the basic Android menus. Right: multitasking.
Multimedia
The 8 Mpx camera sensor is Huawei's attempt to climb up to the high-end and meet the big guys (iPhone 5, Galaxy S3 and the like) on their own turf. But given that pixels aren't everything, how is the overall rendering? Well, it's not that bad, especially in the right lighting. The colours are fairly accurate, but the noise reduction (which isn't 100% effective—you can still see noise in darker colours, especially black) also reduces the sharpness, making for less detail than you get with the iPhone 5 and GS3. But it isn't a train wreck either.
The camera interface includes a few filters and options for you. It focuses and saves photos rather quickly, so you can take several in a row.
The video camera shoots in 1080p with reasonable rendering for this type of smartphone, although we would have preferred a real image stabiliser.
Internet: pages load quickly, but you have to zoom in to read any small writing. Landscape mode helps.
Battery Life
With the 1670 mAh battery fully charged the Ascend P1 lasts a full day of fairly intensive usage (social networking, texts, music, photos, Internet) with 3G and Wi-Fi turned on. That's just about average for this kind of phone, although the Huawei Honor lasts longer.
Pros
- Small, thin & light
- Responsive
- Photo image quality
Cons
- Sound quality
- Colours in landscape mode
- Low internal memory
Conclusion
The Ascend P1 is a pleasant surprise. It may not revolutionise the industry, but it does its job well. The look is minimalist but not "cheap", making for a good everyday companion. It's too bad the sound is so mediocre.
OUR SCORE
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