Huawei Ascend Mate 2 review

Huawei Ascend Mate 2 is the latest giant smartphone from the Chinese manufacturer who has come on leaps and bounds in last 12 months (since it announced the original Huawei Ascend Mate).

Already responsible for constructing most of the world’s 4G/LTE networks, the smartphone-maker’s consumer efforts are starting to really shine too. The new handset not only feels and looks great but it has lots of clever features and some world-beating specs too, though it’s not quite a direct competitor for the high-end Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

The thing that impresses immediately is how much of the front of the device is taken up by the screen. According to Huawei it’s 79% of the front to be precise, with slim bezels of just 3.1mm down the side and only 10.5mm between the screen and the bottom of the device, that’s a smaller bottom edge than any other handset. The upshot of all that is a device that’s not only small for its screen size but also one that’s easy to use as your thumb doesn’t have to reach across before it can start tapping and swiping.

Also on the front is the usual camera for video chat and taking self-portraits. Huawei has taken on how important this is and fitted a 5-megapixel front camera with a bright F2.4 lens and big 1.4um pixels for better low-light performance.

In addition it adds a small portrait window in the upper right corner onscreen, this is placed right up by the camera so you can compose the shot but still be looking at the lens for a more natural and engaging result. The main camera is based around a 13-megapixel back-illuminated sensor from Sony with an F2.0 lens, so you should get good results from that. The Ascend Mate 2 also has remote shooting, so you can fire the camera from an app on another smartphone for group, self portraits.

Another record specification is lurking inside with a huge 4,050mAh battery, compared to ‘just’ 3,020mAh for the Note 3. Huawei boldly claims that this should last most users 2 days, we’d be amazed if that proved to be the case but it’s probably not far off, and it shouldn’t conk out on even the heaviest use days.

That battery is so big in fact, that Huawei has implemented ‘Reverse Charging’ on the handset. That means you can use the supplied micro USB cable to charge other devices from the Ascend Mate 2. Great for topping up Bluetooth headphones on the go, for example. You can even give a friends ailing phone a battery boost in an emergency.

The handset may have great design and some clever extras, but the rest of its specification looks designed to hit a keen price rather than fight it out with flagship handsets. That huge 6.1in display only has a 1,280×720 display, though it still looks pretty impressive, with a crisp-looking home screen and vibrant colours in photos.

Apparently the display is far more battery-efficient than equivalent Full HD displays. This is also thanks to its Low-Temperature Poly-Silicon technology, which is 20-30% more power efficient than typical IPS screens. It also comes with content-adaptive brightness control, so you get a more consistent brightness in use.

Huawei continues with its own heavily-modified version of Android, now with Emotion UI 2.0. This has always provided a more iOS-leaning take on Android, removing the app tray and making apps sit directly on the home screen. The new version continues this, but also provides lots of handy tools so you can manage Android far easier and stay on top of its quirks.

Tools are included so you can manage application notifications on an app-by-app basis from a single unified interface. There’s also a quick scan and optimise tool, which should keep the handset running fast and smooth. There’s also a simple UI mode to ease those in who are coming from smartphones.

The chipset, like the screen resolution, is a relatively modest 1.6GHz quad-core Qualcomm MSM8928. It’s based around the older Krait core and though we wouldn’t expect blistering performance in apps or 3D it should be ample for most uses. In practice the handset felt slick and responsive in use, though this is pretty typical these days for an out-of-the-box device running Android 4.3.

As you’d expect from someone with Huawei’s LTE experience, this handset works on every network and frequency you can name, and a few we’d never even heard of. It also comes with dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking, letting it act as a high-speed 4G hotspot, plus there’s Bluetooth 4.0.

This is a surprisingly impressive handset and if, as we expect, it comes in considerably cheaper than Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3, and beats it in battery tests too, then it should receive a very positive review. Huawei’s unusual take on Android may put off some, but it’s actually looking to have numerous positive points, giving you quick and easy control over how it works behind-the-scenes.

It’s one of the most interesting handsets we’ve seen in a long time then and look forward to doing a full review in the near future.