Huawei Ascend G510 review

The Huawei Ascend G510 is a decent smartphone at a very competitive price – just £130 on pay-as-you-go from Vodafone. The handset feels well-made and looks impressively bland in a rather nice way. It’s a little chunky by modern standards, but it’s easy to keep hold off because of it.

DISPLAY

The 4.5in display is the biggest we’ve seen on a budget handset, which usually have 4in screens at best. Its resolution of 480×854 means it isn’t particularly detailed at just 217 pixels-per-inch. The screen quality is better than we expected, it’s a little muted but colours look accurate and contrast is good. All that said, we did run the phone at maximum brightness most of the time to get a nice punchy image.

There’s a Gorilla Glass panel across the front of phone, so it shouldn’t scratch easily. Below the screen are three touch-sensitive buttons for the usual back, home and menu controls – meaning you don’t lose onscreen space for virtual buttons. There’s a front facing camera for Skype chats and the like, though it only has a basic VGA resolution. It also supports face recognition, so the phone will only unlock when you’re looking at it. This worked very well, and we couldn’t trick by using a similar-looking person or an image of ourselves on another screen.

CAMERA

The 5-megapixel camera surprised us with its quality. The test shots we took were mainly well exposed and full of detail. It did struggle in low light and its video was far less impressive than its stills though.

This resized shot from the camera is a little dark, but it’s still a good effort for a budget snapper. Below you can see a pixel-to-pixel enlargement, where you can see that fine detail is missing – click to enlarge

EMOTION UI

Most manufacturers of budget smartphones leave Android pretty much alone, but Huawei has here used a wide-ranging series of tweaks under the name Emotion UI. The biggest change, and the one that had us flummoxed for some time is that there’s no app tray. Instead all your apps sit on your home screens.

Pinch out and you can see all your home screens at once

It’s actually not a bad idea, as it means novice users won’t have to get their heads around the difference between the app itself and its identical-looking shortcut – a more iPhone style approach. There’s no need to install apps and then create shortcuts, just move important apps to more prominent positions, and leave those you rarely use off to one side. You can pinch-to-zoom to see all your home screens, jump to any screen at a tap, or add extra ones for more room.

Here you can see the customisable settings buttons and home screen options

There are also customisable shortcut buttons on the pull-down notifications screen, so you can have just the settings you regularly need. Other than that, it’s largely Android 4.1 as you’d expect, feeling slick as ever on the capable hardware inside.

HARDWARE

The Huawei Ascend G510 uses a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8225 Snapdragon S4 chipset; S4 is among the latest of Qualcomm products, though this is among the slowest chipsets in the range. It showed in the SunSpider benchmark with a SunSpider score of 2.513ms. That makes it less than half the speed as the fastest phones; it’s not a bad score for a budget phone, but if you’re a keen mobile internet user you might want to think about spending more on a better handset.

Basic 3D games won’t be a problem, but console-like graphical extravaganzas will struggle here as its GPU only scored 2,622 in 3DMark’s Icestorm test. To put this in context it only averaged around 10fps in this demanding test, well short of a smooth 30fps.

The back panel is easy to clip off, letting you get at the slots beneath it

There’s NFC built-in for quick and easy file transfers with other such-equipped hardware, and it has a micro SD card slot so you can expand the 1GB of free internal memory with up to a 32GB card. The battery has a 1,700mAh capacity and lasted for a respectable seven hours and 32 minutes in our video playback test.

CONCLUSION

The G510 does everything that most people want from a smartphone, and its take on Android is pretty easy to get the hang of once you get your head around losing the app tray. On pay-as-you-go it was a great smartphone at a very reasonable price, and so won our Budget Buy award when it launched.

It’s now widely available on pay as you go for around £80. If you’re on a seriously tight budget this phone is an excellent deal. While it is stuck on Android 4.1, with no chance of an update, it is still a capable handset.

It has a large screen, fast processor and a decent battery, making it a good all-round Android phone. Back in April 2013 it cost £130 and received our Budget Buy award. Now, in May 2014 you can pick one up for almost half the price. While it runs at less than half the speed of the newest, fastest phones this is still one of the better performing budget handsets.

The Motorola Moto G is available for £120 and that is still by far and away the best low-cost Android phone, but for people on an even tighter budget the Huawei Ascend G510 is a great option.