Huawei Ascend P2 hands-on
Huawei Ascend P2 is a direct heir of last year's P1, and a very slim one at that. The body is plastic overall, but is feathery light, and, as mentioned, has a very meager waistline, clocking in at 8.4mm.
We are greeted with a 4.7" HD 720p screen at the front, which looks very bright and has decent viewing angles, so we don't really miss the trendy Full HD flagship resolutions this season. Its ‘Magic Touch’ feature provides screen responsiveness even with gloves, similar to the Lumia 920. The screen specs are quite decent as well: 500 nits brightness, viewing angle of 85 degrees, 315 ppi, covering 71% of the standard NTSC color gamut and with 1000:1 contrast ratio.
The phone, which comes in black and white versions, sports glossy back, which we found to be a fingerprint magnet during our brief encounter with the device, and the keys around it feel a bit flimsy, yet sport matte surface, unlike the glossy back. There is a dedicated two-stage shutter key, which you don't get to see often on Android phones these days and comes in very handy for quick snaps.
The phone is powered by Huawei's homebrew 1.5 GHz quad-core K3V2 SoC, which the company claims to be the "fastest" again, as it has a 150 Mbps LTE radio inside. Memorywise we have 1 GB of RAM, as well as 16 GB of internal storage. There is also a high-res 13 MP camera on the back, capable of Full HD 1080p HDR video, so we are guessing a Sony sensor. Huawei mentioned this is the thinnest they could make the phone with this camera sensor module.
Huawei has managed to outfit the slender P2 with a 2420 mAh battery, which doesn't have official talk and playback times yet, but should be plenty. The phone will be available globally from the second quarter in all EU, starting at the very reasonable €399 SIM-free, which is about $525.
Ascend P2 runs Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean with Huawei's own Emotion UI on top, which now features Flipboard-style navigation on the homescreen/main menu combo called UniHome, which aims to simplify your interaction with the handset. We found it quite novel hence a bit confusing, yet it moved briskly without a hint of lag.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: