For a company that had nothing to do with smartphones till three years ago, Huawei has built itself quite an arsenal of products by now. While most of its earlier models were budget phones that were barely acknowledged by gadget enthusiasts, the more recent line-up of its mid-to higher-end smartphones have been getting a fair bit of attention. The latest to fit the bill is the Huawei Ascend P6, marketed by the company as the slimmest smartphone ever! We picked it up to see what else it can possibly boast of!
First impressions
Right out of the box, the Huawei Ascend P6 greeted us in Chinese. For some strange reason (which is explained later), Chinese was the default language, so we had to fiddle with it before we could get it to swap to English. The obvious launch pad – the homescreen of the smartphone sports the customisable ME widget. Here, you can drag and drop your most commonly used apps for quick access. However, a bunch of pre-installed apps had Chinese names which did not change even after I had tweaked the language settings.
Despite the handset running on Android 4.2, Huawei’s proprietary Emotion UI almost completely masks the Android experience. This might be a good thing for some, a bit undesirable for those who are a fan of the near-stock Android experience.
The default lock screen has a slider that unlocks the screen if dragged to the right and starts the camera if you swipe it to the left. You can customise the lock screen and chose between four favourite shortcuts.
You can access all the available apps by sliding to the right. Basically, there isn’t an icon that you tap to access everything on the phone. They are all neatly arranged across four homescreens that you can manually expand up to nine. Plus, you can bunch similar apps together to organise them into folders, so chances are you probably won’t run out of space anytime soon.
Construct
Design-wise, the Huawei Ascend P6 looks quite dainty. The all-white unit we had for review is super-light, super thin (the phone’s USP) and manages to look quite classy. The rear is matte as opposed to the glossy fascia and makes for a relatively non-slip grip. The all-white body and metal buttons are a bit reminiscent of the latest Apple iPhone 5. The fascia itself is devoid of any physical buttons. The only ones on the phone being the Power/Lock and Volume Rocker on the right. The headphone jack sits on the bottom left corner of the bezel and there’s a micro-USB plug-in right on top of the smartphone. The phone doesn’t have a removable battery; the SIM slot and the external memory storage slot are a part of the bezel instead. To open these, they’ve provided a small pin, which fits in perfectly in the 3.5 mm jack and from where you can retrieve it when you want to change your SIM card.
There’s also a convenient pull-down notification bar on the homescreens. Wi-Fi, GPS, Voice Assistance, Bluetooth and Brightness are some of the many features that can be accessed and tweaked directly from this panel. Here’s where you are also alerted of new email messages or app notifications.
The Ascend P6 is powered by a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor and it was quick on its toes throughout the review. Whenever there was a bit of lag due to heavy multi-tasking, shutting down some of the apps quickly restored balance.
The handset comes with 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory. But considering how heavy the UI is, you have about 4GB of it accessible for your media or app-related needs. You can upgrade the memory up to 32GB through the external SD card slot. There’s a special glove mode that you can switch on to enable the phone to sense your touch inputs even if your finger are not in direct contact with the screen.
Despite the phone running on Android 4.2, the unit we reviewed strangely did not give us the option of downloading stuff from the Play Store. We were later informed that this was the binary version that we had received and that all Google bundled apps (including the Play Store) will be pre-installed in every unit for sale. So, we used Huawei’s own app centre instead which was not quite up to the mark, well, at least not when compared to the Play Store.
Despite the super-slim profile, the Huawei Ascend P6 packs in an 8-meg camera at the rear and an unusual 5-megger at the front. The interface is pretty basic with a virtual shutter, video mode toggle, flash options and other settings on the screen. You can choose shooting mode such as Smart, Beauty, HDR, panorama and so on.
The phone gives you just what you’d expect of a mobile camera and nothing more. Sometimes it has a bit of trouble focusing right and fights to capture a good picture under dim light.
The phone comes with a 2000mAh battery, which was sufficient for us to use through a working day – say roughly 12 hours of intermittent browsing, video streaming and app usage. You can change the power profiles conveniently to get some extra juice in case the battery’s almost drained out.
We say
While the phone packs in the specs required to have a successful run in the market, the final price in the Indian market is going to be a deciding factor in whether it’s great value for money.
£300 (Indicative; India price to be announced at time of launch next week)
Love –Good-looks, 5-meg front camera
Hate – Emotion UI can get annoying, average battery life