Huawei Ascend P6 review

Huawei’s press conference at Mobile World Congress in February was dominated by the launch of the Ascend P2, but even before the P2 hit the shelves in the UK Huawei had announced the very similar, if slimmer and prettier, P6.

Like the P2, the P6 has a 4.7-inch 1,280×720 display, and it even has the same 1.5GHz quad-core processor. However, the P6 has a couple of advantages. Firstly, it runs Android 4.2 instead of 4.1, and is an incredible 7mm thick.

It’s also a rather beautiful handset. The Ascend P6 is one of the rare phones that impresses people straight out of the box. The flat front and back and brushed metal sides are attractive, and the textured plastic rear makes the phone comfortable to hold. There’s also a minimal air gap between the LCD and the glass touchscreen, which helps the operating system feel like it’s right under your finger. We’re also fans of the way the headphone port has a metal plug, which keeps the design clean, but we’re not sure how long the plug would last before getting lost.

Apparently the 3.5mm headphone jack is the limiting factor in how slim Huawei can make a phone

The P6 has the same screen as the P2, which is certainly a good thing. It may not be Full HD, but 1,280×720 pixels is enough to give you sharp text and icons on a 4.7in display, and you can read desktop-mode web pages when zoomed right out. We’re also fans of the panel’s clean whites and vibrant colours – it’s certainly one of the better mobile screens we’ve seen.

Huawei has overhauled its Emotion interface for the P6. The round, blobby icons from previous Emotion versions have gone, replaced with smart, modern-looking squares. It looks great, but you may not like the operating system’s layout. If you’re used to Android, with its distinction between customisable homescreens full of icons and widgets and a main app tray for all your programs, you’ll be lost at first. Emotion gets rid of the app tray entirely, leaving you with just homescreens for your apps and widgets.

A lovely screen and a refresh for Huawei’s Emotion UI

The UI adds more homescreens as you fill up the current ones, so you don’t have to worry about space, but it does mean there’s no distinction between apps and widgets you use all the time and those you only look at occasionally; you still have to flick through all the apps you own, rather than pinning your favourites to a dedicated screen. You can at least tidy things up by putting apps into folders.

Another drawback with the Emotion UI is that it seems to impact the phone’s performance. The P6 just doesn’t perform anywhere near as well as it should do, considering it has a quad-core processor and 1.7GB RAM. The phone lags and stutters when you type web addresses into both Chrome and the built-in browser, and is jerky when scrolling around image-heavy websites. The keyboard lags behind your typing, and we’re not fans of having a .com button instead of a space bar, as this makes it fiddly to type in phrases in the browser search bar. It feels much slower than other similarly-priced phones, such as the HTC One Mini and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, even though they have two rather than four cores.

Having a .com button rather than a space bar is just annoying

The performance deficit is also shown in our benchmarks. When running the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in the built-in Mozilla-based browser, the phone limped to complete the test in 3,887ms, which is even slower than that managed by the Samsung Galaxy Young, the previous slowest handset we’d seen. Even when we switched to Google Chrome, the score only improved to 2,541ms, which is only around what we’d expect from a budget Android smartphone.

Things didn’t improve much in 3DMark, where the P6 managed a score of 2,916 – worthy of a budget handset, not a £300-plus one. The built-in Riptide GP 3D racing game was jerky in places. The phone can also only claim average battery life from its 2,000mAh battery, lasting 7h 20m in our light-use battery test. It always gave us a full day’s use and never let us down, though.

We were much more impressed with the P6’s camera, once we’d turned off the software effects. The default Smart mode made a mess of our outdoor shots, with huge overexposure and a strange lined pattern in the sky. When we turned the Smart mode off photos were far better, with accurate exposures and colours. The camera also made a reasonable job of indoor shots in low light; these showed more noise than our current low-light champions, the HTC One and One Mini, but definitely had less noise than average.

Smart mode makes a mess of daylight photos’ exposure

But turn the fancy effects off and you’ll get proper exposures and accurate colours

The Huawei Ascend P6 is a lovely design and a genuinely desirable phone, and we’re certainly impressed with its screen and camera. However, it just doesn’t have the performance to live up to its great hardware. When Huawei produces software to match its hardware it will be a force to be reckoned with, but for the moment we’d stick with the HTC One Mini at this price.