Huawei Ascend Mate 2 review

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.